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WIT
* Written by Margaret Edson * Directed by Derek Anson Jones * Starring Kathleen Chalfant |
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“I was a scholar back when I had shoes and eyebrows,” says Vivian Bearing, the rueful heroine of Margaret Edson’s *Wit.* Indeed, Dr. Bearing (played by Kathleen Chalfant, best-known for her work in Tony Kushner’s *Angels in America*) has spent her entire adult life honing her expertise on the so-called “holy sonnets” of 17th century poet John Donne and wielding it like a rapier against her intimidated students. Now she’s a bald creature in two layers of hospital gown tethered to an IV pole and reduced to a diagnosis: Stage IV metastatic ovarian cancer. It takes every last ounce of wit she can muster to sustain a shred of her humanity in the face of a terrifying flood of medical jargon and research doctors who treat her as a specimen. Luckily for her and for us in the audience, this gal has a lot on the ball. She’s tough and funny and doesn’t miss a trick, starting with a killer impersonation of the forced cheer she has to endure every time an M.D. barrels into her room: “How’re you FEELING today? Graaayt!” The play impressionistically tracks both the exterior drama of Dr. Bearing’s treatment and her internal review of her life’s work in words: increasing her word power as a 5-year-old Beatrix Potter fan, apprenticing with a female professor who goads her into an appreciation of the metaphysics of punctuation in Donne’s most famous sonnet, “Death be not proud.” Although the playwright doesn’t specify, we are free to read Dr. Bearing as a lesbian -- not just because she’s 50, never married, and never been pregnant but because she doesn’t define herself in relation to a man, or any other lover. Not that she’s a dried-up stick of a schoolmarm. Her lust for scholarship is positively contagious. It’s just that something is missing, and she doesn’t grasp what until she’s surrounded by equally knowledge-driven doctors babbling rapturously about “enzyme kinetics” and bypassing her pale face to dive for the clipboard at the foot of the bed. Meanwhile, the Latina nurse (a gorgeous performance by Paula Pizzi) who knows that 4 a.m. is a perfect time to administer a hug and a popsicle to a chemo-parched patient couldn’t seem more miraculous if she were the Virgin Mary appearing at Lourdes. Director Derek Anson Jones has done an impeccable job of managing the speedy flow of Vivian’s inner monologue and the theatrical shush of hospital curtains. And Chalfant gives the kind of brave, generous performance standing ovations were invented to honor. Most hospital dramas are long on sentiment and short on science. Watching *Wit*, which plays through January 3 at the intimate MCC Theater, you definitely get to run your own movies of watching someone barf into an orange plastic tub or go spacy from overmedication, or the nurse you wanted to personally escort to Stockholm to receive her Nobel Prize. But Edson, an elementary school teacher in Atlanta who worked on the cancer unit of a research hospital, packs the play with telling details. (For instance, in one brief scene, the emotional impact on the patient of rattling off a family medical history is lost on the intern hurriedly filling out forms.) More important, the play does what Donne’s sonnets are said to do: invite us to look at things -- life, death, love, language -- with increasing levels of complexity. I haven’t seen a new play this good in years. The Advocate, December 8, 1998 |
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