Introduction
Wit won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for theater performance. The play also got the “Best New Play” prize for 1999 from the New York Drama Critics’ Circle. As the play did not get a performance at a Broadway theatre, Wit was not appropriate for the Tony Awards. Chalfant got an award from the Village Voice Obies for her presentation. In 2001, the play was adapted into a cable TV movie with Emma Thompson as Vivian Bearing.
Wit is the first play by the American schoolteacher and dramatist Margaret Edson. Edson applied her work understanding in a hospital as part of the encouragement for her play. Wit obtained its world premiere at South Coast Repertory, California, in 1995 Long Wharf Theater, Connecticut, consequently performed the play in November 1997, with Kathleen Chalfant starring. The play got its first New York City performance in September 1998, at the MCC Theater, with Chalfant performance as Vivian Bearing. An extract from the play was issued in the New York Times in September 1998. Chalfant got strong admire for her recital. She also integrated her own life practice into her work on the performance, comprising the final decease and death of her brother Alan Palmer from cancer. The play shifted to the Union Square Theater in December 1998, after its triumphant initial run in New York City.
The Theme of Death
Wit starts with Vivian addressing the watchers: she is presently a patient in a central research clinic undergoing curing for sophisticated ovarian cancer, and she realizes that the prognosis is not consolatory. “The Faerie Queene this is not,” she recommends, alluding to Edmund Spenser’s verses, a tribute to the glory of Queen Elizabeth and her assets. Before her hospitalization, she was Professor Bearing, educator and intellectual, focusing on the Holy Sonnets of John Donne. Vivian takes the spectators to different views in the earlier period and her current life that enlightens her attainments in the world of education and reveal what ensues to her as she is treated with violent chemotherapy for eight months. What the spectators watch is what Vivian herself observes, and so actuality is twisted in accordance to her understanding.
As Vivian experiences a sequence of tests and procedures in the disinfected clinic surroundings, she takes the watchers back twenty years to a stumble upon with her school tutor, E.M. Ashford, after which she settles on that anything will prevent her to become a top-grade scholar and that her selected sphere of research will be one of the most difficult, the poetry of John Donne. She also remembers the minute in her youth with her father when she first fell in love with reading and words. While in her hospital bed, Vivian remembers her life in the class, where she was viewed as a spell-obligatory lecturer on Donne and a severe teacher of literature. Paradoxically, one of her medicals, Jason, is a previous student and now a potential investigator in his own occupation, having been motivated by Vivian’s inflexible research.
As the chemotherapy deteriorates Vivian and the physicians seem to take less and less observance of her pain and reduced capability, she comes to rely on her nurse, Susie, who notices her pain and treats her with compassion. She assists Vivian make a decision on a DNR order (Do Not Resuscitate). As she dies, having studied a lot about life, Vivian is at peace with herself and her death.
Cancer is, in dramatic terms, not the death of choice. It takes too long, it’s frightening and boring, and the chances are that a significant portion of the audience is going to die that way. So why would people want to shell out bucks to go through it twice?
But in Wit, Margaret Edson takes the confrontation head-on, and creates her main quality run the gauntlet from analysis to chemo, partial cure, deterioration, and, finally, death. And she does it with any props. In Wit there are no devotees, no concluding speeches at Yankee stadium, no last ones for the Gipper, and, fascinatingly, no religious conviction. For Edson, death is not a team game. It is a struggle one-on-one.
Disinterest and infatuation make for outlandish bedfellows, as do metaphysics and love. Both Vivian and John Donne have found methods to consult that province, and the manufacture requirements to concentrate on the force of those amalgamations. Without the right edge, Wit is in hazard of slipping from a nature drama into a Tuesdays with Morrie-like consideration on sacred restitution. As a professor, Vivian was superior to life and, given the finale, she is huger than death.
Donne’s poetry as the Key Moment in the Theme of Death
This meaning of the theatrical, of a “speaker” in divergence, is obvious in Donne’s Holy limericks. Donne is thought to have created these heavenly verses around 1609, during a difficult middle epoch of his life in which he opposed to maintain his progressively increasing family. In accordance to Helen Gardner, the Holy Sonnets were written several years before Donne took holy arranges in the Anglican Church in 1615, and previous to he would become a great priest and Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral. They are considerations on death, offense, and deliverance; in them, the presenter moves between extremes – expect and desolation, fear and terror – searching for salvation, something he can never be sure he has found. It’s a quandary that Margaret Edson ingeniously classifies as “Salvation Anxiety” in her performance. And this superiority has earned Donne a standing (according to H. J. C. Grierson) as “our first powerfully individual religious poet, articulating not the mind merely of the Christian, but the divergences and longings of one anxious soul, one delicate and implausible intellect.”
Conclusion
At the beginning of the Fells Point Corner Theatre production, audience was asked to stay seated for 1 hour and 45 minutes. That’s a lot to inquire, and the result is meant to be one of increasing anxiety. Whenever that sense is lost, either due to dead space or pitched-off lines, the spectators sits back and the play starts moving to its selected termination by inactivity. While the FPCT construction mainly evades these derailments, Wit is not so much about the death as it is about Vivian and her life, and realization of life.
References
Edson, Margaret Wit Faber & Faber publishers, 1999.