Wit
by Margaret Edson
Burton Taylor Theatre, 2-6.12.03

Margaret Edson, an elementary school teacher in Atlanta, Georgia, won the Pulitzer Prize drama award for Wit, written following a stint working as a clerk in a cancer and AIDS inpatient unit at a research hospital. The play follows Professor Vivian Bearing’s journey through treatment for ovarian cancer, intercut with episodes from her academic career as a professor of 17th century poetry. The juxtaposition of the disciplines of poetry and medicine is a rich and poignant one, raising questions of research and compassion, and paralleling academic bitchiness with medical detachment. Dr Bearing has been just as critical and incisive as the doctors who now treat her, and she recognises this: “now I know how poems feel”, she says; “they read me like a book”. She unsentimentally and without self-pity studies those who study her, translating her treatment into a poem of eight stanzas, where medical complications become sub-plots of the main theme – suffering. In particular the parallel is drawn between her and Dr Jason Posner, who took her class while studying biochemistry. Both of them admit to “preferring research to humanity” – but both poetry and medicine inevitably involve people.

The Burton Taylor was the perfect setting for this play, dealing as it does with questions of intimacy and detachment; there is no escape for the audience from the lessons in suffering that Vivian is forced to learn and we suffer with her, wincing at her invasive examinations, guiltily implicated in her ‘dissection’ in front of research students, and finally both moved and shocked by Vivian’s last, incredible scene. The lighting, the simple but effective props, and of course the very strong cast all make for a powerful hour and forty minutes. In particular praise must go to Elisabeth Grey and Helen Bowman who play Vivian and Susie (Vivian’s nurse) with passion and control.

At times uncomfortable, at others frustrating or moving, this play is bold and brave and demands to be seen, for its humanity and compassion and rigorous treatment of a subject we would all rather shut our eyes to, as well as the fact that all profits are to be donated to the Anthony Nolan trust. Susie’s insistent question to both disciplines “what happens in the end?” – what is the point? – is the question that the audience is left with. This is a production which forces you to lift your eyes from the detachment of the puzzle – whether it is Donne or cellular growth, satisfying as either may be to the academic mind – and see how it relates to the puzzle of life.

Katherine Venn, 02.12.03