"Wit" Performance Review

“Wit” performance review, The Daily Cardinal, September 2000

Following shortly after the Rep’s facile season opener, the musical I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change, Wit comes as a dramatically bold, unsettling, often excruciating rebuttal to its predecessor. It is also a provocative reminder of what live theater can offer in terms of narrative clarity, fierce characterization and rigorous authenticity.

Neither based on fact nor very likely to be filed under “disease of the week” fiction, Wit blends conventions of both those popular formulas, for better and for worse.

Vivian Bearing, Ph.D. (Lori Larsen) is routinely informed by her doctor that she has stage four ovarian cancer. There is no “stage five,” Professor Bearing grimly quips. Having devoted her life to the pursuit of knowledge — she is a scholar of John Donne’s 17th-century metaphysical poetry — she is receptive to the doctor’s suggestion that she undergo an experimental chemotherapeutic therapy, knowing she has little hope for survival. Dr. Kelekian (Paul Boesing) rarely surfaces again, making way for a bustling team of anonymous lab technicians and a detached automaton of a research fellow, Dr. Jason Posner (David Quicksall).

Through monologue, flashback, and an acerbically comic doctor-patient interview conducted by Dr. Posner, Vivian is revealed to the audience, with all of her hardhearted imperfections and exacting standards (for both herself and her students). But whether standing at an arm’s length from an IV pole or slumped in her cold hospitable bed, Vivian, from the play’s first moments, never fails to evoke the audience’s sympathy. Perhaps it’s her pluck, her unwavering courage. Or perhaps it’s her wit. (At one point, during examination, she jokes, “I just hold still and look cancerous.”)

Of course, there’s also her impending mortality to consider. She’s very candid about that, too. “They’ve given me less than two hours,” she comments dryly at the play’s outset, making the first of several concessions that this is, after all, a play. The intensity of these concessions deepens as the play — and her sickness — develop. At one point, after vomiting repeatedly into a bedpan, she acknowledges that it must be difficult for the audience to watch; she then asks the audience to consider how difficult it must be for her, to “play the part” — a statement with obvious double meaning.

The hospitable staff is not completely impervious to her pain. Dr. Posner, a former student of Professor Bearing’s, makes a few clumsy attempts at spanning the several gaps that exist between them — of gender, generation, scholarship and occupation. And in so doing, he reveals important similarities between these two highly complicated individuals.

But Vivian’s decidedly uncomplicated nurse, Susie Monahan (Olivia D. Dawson), is the only character who truly feels sympathy for the patient. Susie is the moral hero of the play, the character who shares a surreptitious Popsicle with Vivian; who tenderly rubs lotion on the dying woman’s hands; and who can even get away with calling this hardened scholar “sweetheart.”

Vivian eventually comes to realize how “corny” her life has become. Unfortunately, this happens when one watching the play might be having the same thought about the play itself. There are times when Wit buckles under the heavy weight of sentiment — and corniness. Where Susie’s interactions with Vivian draw on just the right amount of compassion and credulity, a later attempt at poignancy, involving a return to the stage of a now-aged professor (Ruth Schudson) first seen in flashback, is contrived and embarrassing. Without diminishing the caliber of Schudson’s performance, there is something that Dawson intrinsically has as an actor — specifically, a touching rapport with the Bearing character — that inoculates her from similar criticism.

More troubling than the reunion of professor and student, however, is the play’s final sequence. This conclusion — a strident, tangled examination of medical ethics and professional disgrace — is a contradiction of the thoughtful narrative stance of every scene that precedes it. It seems almost a capitulation to a presumed demand for histrionic conflict, even as it brings the play’s subplot — involving Dr. Posner’s systematic dehumanizing of his patient to specimen — to its logical, if extreme, resolution. For a play that so plainly flowers in its many moments of quiet humanity and honesty toward its difficult subject, it was disappointing to accept an ending that compromises the play’s credibility and confuses its objectives. More importantly, the ending distracts from Wit’s central event: Vivian Bearing’s death.

Margaret Edson’s play, written almost a decade ago and first produced in 1995, has arrived in Madison in unusually timely fashion, having only last year enjoyed a successful run off-Broadway and won the Pulitzer Prize for drama, the first ever awarded a first-time playwright. There has even been news of a forthcoming HBO adaptation starring Emma Thomson and directed by Mike Nichols (The Graduate). It runs at the Isthmus Playhouse at the Madison Civic Center, 211 State Street, through September 24, with several post-show discussions scheduled.