Pulitzer Prize Winning play "Wit" by Margaret Edson, is a story that makes it evident that every person has a personal, a historical, and a sacred face, a story they are living and a journey that are attempting to fulfill. The plays central character is Vivian Bearing, Ph.D., a 48-year-old professor specializing in the forbidding work of 17th Century metaphysical poet John Donne. With biting humor and wit, Vivian approaches her illness as she would one of Donne's sonnets, aggressively probing and intensely rational. However, over the course of eight months of high-dose chemotherapy, and several flashbacks to her childhood and teaching years, Vivian sees many of the smug assumptions about her life and legacy explode in the face of her growing dependency on others.
Edson portrays a character that's real and is instilled with the most essential human condition that attributes to the spirits ability to long endure. She creates someone that all readers can be drawn to because of her mortal self discovery that all beings undergo. Edson chronicles the personal awakening of a longtime literary scholar, who learns the importance of simple human kindness when faced with the most daunting of crises, a fatal disease. "Wit" is the quintessential play dealing with thought and action. It's a play it's most human form and it leaves you feeling both captivated and enlightened and oddly enough comforted. .
Edson's play that leaves you asking "what a piece of work is man" and wondering "what dreams may come" it is that profound. She succeeds in capturing that most elusive of combinations: literature that is both tender and human and real as well as enlightening, the kind of writing that hits you hard where it counts and leaves you with something to wonder about. "Wit" in its most recent adaptation was an HBO film starring Emma Thompson in critically acclaimed performance. The play itself is truly uplifting.
