books:

	Wit : A Play Margaret Edson Faber & Faber, 1999 - 96 pages average customer review:based on 57 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Yet the play, both in performance and as literature, is compelling. This play, in the great expressionist style, creates a world as seen through the eyes of only one character. Events unfold from a distinct point of view that is made comprehensible to us by allowing that POV to address us apart from stage events.

Edson, a literature graduate and former oncology ward worker, is knowledgeable about the topics that inform this play: classic poetry and cancer. The connection between the metaphysical lyrics of John Donne and the imminent mortality of uterine cancer provide a smooth harmony in the character of Dr. Vivian Bearing. Thematically and structurally, this play has the theatrical elements that make playwrights from Sophocles to Strindburg to Sam Shepard writers of great significance.

This isn't to say the play is easy to stage. Scene shifts take place without a pause to let actors get their feet. Our narrator gets a pelvic exam in full view of the audience. Supporting characters double on the fly, and lead characters have to change ages from scene to scene. At the final moments, our narrator appears in front of us as naked as the day she was born.

But these difficult elements contribute to the great meaning that is this play. Without these trials, the production wouldn't touch us in the same way. We need these almost offensive structural components to understand what the narrator must endure.

This play is difficult to read, difficult to stage, difficult to watch. Yet the things that make it difficult make it most ultimately rewarding. A modern classic from a forward-thinking mind.

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Book better than TV version.

I had previously only seen the TV version with Emma Thompson. But here's how New Yorker magazine described the TV version: "Anyone who makes the effort to transfer a play to TV runs the risk of focusing excessively on plot and dialogue and of failing to catch the elusive nonverbal elements in his butterfly net. This is what happened with the TV version of `Wit'... Most of the deliberately self-conscious stage devices, which were integral to the play, and necessary to give full dimension the main character, were gone, and the TV version became largely a story about an interesting woman dying of cancer".

Even though the TV version was excellent, the book version was better. I strongly recommend the book to anyone who's only seen the TV version.

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Brilliant

Reading plays is somewhat of an art.
Most plays are not nice to read since dialogue will usually feel flat and stage directions usually leave a lot to the imagination of both actors and directors, requiring additional concentration to picture what is really going on.
Wit is one of those plays that is a pleasure to read even for anyone not used to read them. Part of this is that Wit is mainly a big monologue that tells us the current predicament of the main character while still giving us small glimpses of her previous life.
And unlike so many works in these days and age, it is also a play that has something to say. As One Flew Over The Cookoo's Nest was a sharp criticism on mental institutions, so will Wit remain a real slap in the face for modern medicine and hospital care. And alas... something will unfortunately ring true no matter what country you live in.

I did not have the chance to see the Mike Nichol's adaptation with Emma Thompson, so I cannot say how it compares.

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Unbelieveably close to home

Having witnessed the slow death of my mother from congestive heart failure and emphasyma, "Wit" brought home to me (with a gut sucker-punch) all of my own ordeal, not through MY experience, but through my mother's. Watching this, it was as though the writer, the director and Ms. Thompson (is there a FINER actress on the planet right now?) had mined my mother's brain unbeknownst to me as she lay dying in a hospital in order to show me - compassionately, humanely yet SO dramatically and angonizingly - the other side of death. One might have titled it "The Other Side of Dying".

One watches loved ones die and one is concentrated upon one's own grief and feelings; "Wit" takes you over the fence, makes you trod the ground over which the dying patient walks with increasingly faltering steps, right up until the end. "Wit" is not easy viewing; but - from the agonies of its main character, to the ineptutide and shocking lack of compassion by all the medical staff save Audra McDonald's character - it is necessary viewing in a time when insurance and the medical community say they care, but don't act as though they do. One is reminded that "pure research" can never be such, because its results flow from the faults and frailties of the human body and experience. A tour de force performance from a first-rate cast.

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"It is not my intention to give away the plot",

Dr. Vivian Bearing states at the beginning of the play but she does anyway. Though at the start this may not break your heart by the end of Vivian's journey it does. She is a woman who spent her life studying and teaching Donne's metaphysical poetry now she is the one being taught. She has to learn what the cancer inside of her is doing but most importantly she learns to be afriad and human. At the end of Ms. Edson's moving play the reader is left wishing there was a different end for Vivian. This play is definitely worth the read!


reviews: 1, 2, page 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12

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