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Editorial Review |
WIT
- Book Review,
by Margaret Edson
Amazon.com
Wit is that rare beast: art that engages both the heart and the mind. "It is not my intention to give away the plot," Vivian Bearing, Ph.D., announces near the beginning of Margaret Edson's Pulitzer Prize-winning play, "but I think I die at the end. They've given me less than two hours." For two hours, this famed Donne scholar takes center stage, interrupting her doctors, nurses, and students to explicate her own story, its metaphors and conceits. Recently diagnosed with late-stage ovarian cancer, she is being treated with an experimental drug cocktail administered in "eight cycles. Eight neat little strophes." The chemo makes her feel worse than she ever thought possible; in fact, the treatment is making her sick, not the disease--an irony she says she'd appreciate in a Donne sonnet, if not so much in life. Throughout, Vivian finds, the doctors study and discuss her body like a text: "Once I did the teaching, now I am taught. This is much easier. I just hold still and look cancerous. It requires less acting every time." As her time draws to a close, a sea change begins to work in the way Vivian thinks about life, death, and indeed, Donne. His complex, tightly knotted poems have always been a puzzle for her formidable intellect, a chance to display "verbal swordplay" and wit. Her sickness presents an entirely different challenge. A powerful, prickly personality, capable of dry asides even during a bout of gut-wrenching nausea ("You may remark that my vocabulary has taken a turn for the Anglo-Saxon"), Vivian develops a new appreciation for the simple, the maudlin, the kind. Not to give away the plot, but the final moments in Margaret Edson's debut are as wrenching--as human--as anything in recent drama. --Mary Park
Donald Lyons, The Wall Street Journal
"An original and urgent work of art . . . among the finest plays of the decade."
Peter Marks, The New York Times
"[A] brutally human and beautifully layered new play . . . you feel both enlightened and, in a strange way, enormously comforted."
John Simon, New York magazine
"A dazzling and humane play you will remember till your dying day."
Review
“Among the finest plays of the decade . . . An original and urgent work of art.”—David Lyons, The Wall Street Journal
“A dazzling and humane play you will remember till your dying day.”—John Simon, New York magazine
“[A] brutally human and beautifully layered new play . . . You will feel both
enlightened and, in a strange way, enormously comforted.”—Peter Marks, The New York Times
“A one-of-a-kind experience: wise, thoughtful, witty and wrenching.”—Vincent
Canby, The New York Times Year in Review
“A thrilling, exciting evening in the theater . . . [Wit is] an extraordinary
and most moving play.”—Clive Barnes, New York Post
“Wit is exquisite . . . an exhilarating and harrowing 90-minute revelation.”—
Linda Winer, Newsday
“Edson writes superbly . . . [A] moving, enthralling and challenging experience
that reminds you what theater is for.”—Fintan O’Toole, New York Daily News
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Book Review |
WIT
- Book Reviews,
by Margaret Edson
WIT FROM THE PUBLISHER In this extraordinary first play, which will move to Broadway in the winter of 1999, Margaret Edson has created a work that is as intellectually challenging as it is emotionally immediate. At the start of Wit, Vivian Bearing, Ph.D., a renowned professor of English who has spent years studying and teaching the brilliantly difficult metaphysical sonnets of John Donne, has been diagnosed with terminal ovarian cancer. Her approach to her illness is not unlike her approach to the study of Donne: aggressively probing, intensely rational, deeply witty. But during the course of her illness—and her stint as a prize patient in an experimental chemotherapy program at a major teaching hospital—Vivian comes to reassess her life and her work with a profundity and humor that are transformative both for her and for the audience. SYNOPSIS Called "a dazzling and humane play you will remember till your dying day" by John Simon in New York Magazine, Wit is centered on Vivian Bearing, Ph.D., a scholar of seventeenth-century poetry who, as she is dying of ovarian cancer, comes to reassess her life and her work with a passion and humor that are both moving and redemptive. FROM THE CRITICS John Simon
A dazzling and humane play you will remember till your dying day. -- New York Magazine Donald Lyons An original and urgent work of art . . . among the finest plays of the decade. -- The Wall Street Journal Peter Marks [A] brutally human and beautifully layered new play . . . you feel both enlightened and, in a strange way, enormously comforted. -- The New York Times Journal of the American Medical Association While the play's ferocious intensity may intimidate, its transformative power should be provocative and enlightening for those of us who must make life-and-death decisions for our patients.
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