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Wit: A Play, by Margaret Edson
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Winner of the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, the Drama Desk Award, the Outer Critics Circle Award, the Lucille Lortel Award, and the Oppenheimer Award
Margaret Edson's powerfully imagined Pulitzer Prize–winning play examines what makes life worth living through her exploration of one of existence's unifying experiences—mortality—while she also probes the vital importance of human relationships. What we as her audience take away from this remarkable drama is a keener sense that, while death is real and unavoidable, our lives are ours to cherish or throw away—a lesson that can be both uplifting and redemptive. As the playwright herself puts it, "The play is not about doctors or even about cancer. It's about kindness, but it shows arrogance. It's about compassion, but it shows insensitivity."
In Wit, Edson delves into timeless questions with no final answers: How should we live our lives knowing that we will die? Is the way we live our lives and interact with others more important than what we achieve materially, professionally, or intellectually? How does language figure into our lives? Can science and art help us conquer death, or our fear of it? What will seem most important to each of us about life as that life comes to an end?
The immediacy of the presentation, and the clarity and elegance of Edson's writing, make this sophisticated, multilayered play accessible to almost any interested reader.
As the play begins, Vivian Bearing, a renowned professor of English who has
spent years studying and teaching the intricate, difficult Holy Sonnets of the
seventeenth-century poet John Donne, is diagnosed with advanced ovarian cancer. Confident of her ability to stay in control of events, she brings to her illness the same intensely rational and painstakingly methodical approach that has guided her stellar academic career. But as her disease and its excruciatingly painful treatment inexorably progress, she begins to question the single-minded values and standards that have always directed her, finally coming to understand the aspects of life that make it truly worth living.
- Sales Rank: #122043 in eBooks
- Published on: 2014-05-20
- Released on: 2014-05-20
- Format: Kindle eBook
Amazon.com Review
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
Review
'Cuts deep... a coruscating metaphor for all our helpless efforts to orchestrate our lives, despite our awareness of our mortality' - The Times; 'Delightfully funny and deeply moving... its final radiant moment is breathtaking' - Independent; 'Truly wonderful - emotionally battering, yes, but very funny, never mawkish and ultimately exultant' - Telegraph; 'Edson's writing has its harrowing moments but it is never maudlin... A genuinely life-enhancing play about death' - Guardian; 'Heart-battering... as glorious and cathartic as theatre gets' - The Stage; 'An original and urgent work of art. Among the finest plays of the decade' - Wall Street Journal; 'A dazzling and humane play you will remember until your dying day' - New York Magazine; 'A brutally human and beautifully layered new play. You will feel both enlightened and, in a strange way, enormously comforted' - New York Times
From the Publisher
Now the basis for an HBO film starring Emma Thompson, Christopher Lloyd, Eileen Atkins, Audra McDonald, Jonathan Woodward, and Harold Pinter, and directed by Mike Nichols, airing in March and April 2001.
Most helpful customer reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
Being Real as Death Approaches
By JAHay
This book took me by the scruff of the neck and rebuked me for the 'posturing' and 'trying to impress others' type of behaviour, that I and others so often engage in. What do our 'achievements' matter in the face of death? After reading this book, I saw the importance of being 'real', and of being a decent person. I saw too the importance that forgiveness is to those of us who carry weights that have accrued from wrongdoings committed during a lifetime. The 'professionalism' of some of the characters in the play made them seem more akin to robots that to people with a heart and a soul. Being human, with all its frailties and doubts is far preferable to being a machine like character. This book left me with a sense of hope, and longing even, and anxiety too, in the sense that I am moving irrevocably towards the day when I too will take my last gasping breath. But then there is John Donne's word;
'One short sleep past, and then we wake eternally; death will be no more, death shall die.'
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
'THIS IS MY PLAYES LAST SCENE ...'
By David Keymer
If poisonous minerals, and if that tree,
Whose fruit threw death on else immortall us,
If lecherous goats, if serpents envious
Cannot be damn'd; Alas; why should I bee?
...
That remember them [i.e., his sins], some claime as debt,
I think it mercy, if thou wilst forget.
W;t is a clever play, starting with its title. For wit is the weapon the great metaphysical poet John Donne used in his sonnets to approach an unapproachable God and the protagonist of this play, Vivian Bearing, Ph. D., is a Donne scholar whose great book is a study of Donne's twelve Holy Sonnets. (The book is entitled Made Cunningly.) And the use of the semicolon in place of an `I' between the first and last letters of the title echoes a remembered conversation between Vivian, still an undergraduate student, and her soon to be mentor, E. M. Ashford, on the importance of punctuation in Donne's poems.
And death shall be no more, comma, Death thou shalt die.
Nothing but a breath -a comma- separates life from life everlasting. It is very simple really. With the original punctuation restored,
death is no longer something to act out on a stage, with exclamation points. It's a comma, a pause. This way, the uncompromising
way, one learns something from this poem, wouldn't you say? Life, death. Soul, God. Past, present. Not insuperable barriers, not
semicolons, just a comma.
(I suppose a comma would have looked wrong in the title typographically, but the use of the comma still carries forward the conceit of only an item of punctuation separating the beginning of something from the end, in this case, Vivian's life.)
The play is cunningly put together, essentially a monologue that continues from beginning until near the very end of the play (Vivian's conversation with the audience about her treatment) interspersed with brief scenes of Vivian with her doctor, Vivian with the nurse and with the technicians, Vivian and the research fellow in medical oncology (who once took her course on the sonnets -"you can't get into medical school unless you're well-rounded") and scenes of remembrance Vivian as an undergraduate with her mentor, Vivian teaching). The play ends in a swirl of activity as Vivian's systems fail. So it's In (Vivian monologuing), Out (swirl of activity, interchanges with other characters), In, Out. It happens over and over again, until the final burst of activity, after which it all just . . . ends.
One of the most interesting aspects of the play is the way it captures character. Vivian, ill, discovers that the research fellow, just like her in the classroom, cares less for the people he's caring for than the subject he's studying. But, bitterly ill now, Vivian wants him to care for her, needs care. And thus, responds to the decidedly unintellectual advances of her nurse, who at least accepts that it is part of her job to comfort the frightened and ailing.
This is my playes last scene, here heavens appoint
My pilgrimages last mile; and my race
Idly, yet quickly runne, hath this last pace,
My spans last inch, my minutes last point,
My body, `and my soule
John Donne, 1609
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
A Lesson in Humility
By Linda Wheatley
The lesson of humility is the last and hardest to acquire. It requires a shift from a modern paradigm that equates "success" with "accomplishment"--something that can be achieved through competition or will--to an older, "simpler" paradigm rooted in surrender and acceptance--a paradigm that sees grace as a gift requiring only the ability to seek, ask, and receive. It is simple but not easy. Vivian learns all this in the final nine-months of her life as she "learns to suffer" whilet dying from stage four ovarian cancer. With only her wit to defend and sustain her. from the dehumanizing forces of the medical "machine." Vivian is ransformed from a critical, and evaluative "senior-scholar" to a vulnerable human-being seeking only "the touch of human kindness" in her final confrontation with her own mortality...
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