Wit
Winner of the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, the Drama Desk Award, the Outer Critics Circle Award, the Lucille Lortel Award, and the Oppenheimer Award\ Margaret Edson’s powerfully imagined Pulitzer Prize–winning play examines what makes life worth living through her exploration of one of existence’s unifying experiences—mortality—while she also probes the vital importance of human relationships. What we as her audience take away from this remarkable...
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In this extraordinary play, Margaret Edson has created a work that is as intellectually challenging as it is emotionally immediate. At the start of Wit, Vivian Bearing, Ph.D., a renowned professor of English who has spent years studying and teaching the brilliantly difficult Holy Sonnets of the metaphysical poet John Donne, has been diagnosed with terminal ovarian cancer. Her approach to her illness is not unlike her approach to the study of Donne: aggressively probing and intensely rational. But during the course of her illness — and her stint as a prize patient in an experimental chemotherapy program at a major teaching hospital — Vivian comes to reassess her life and her work with a profundity and humor that are transformative both for her and for the audience.Donald LyonsAn original and urgent work of art . . . among the finest plays of the decade. -- The Wall Street Journal
The questions, discussion topics, and suggested reading list that follow are intended to enhance your group’s enjoyment of Margaret Edson’s powerfully imagined Pulitzer Prize-winning drama, Wit. We hope they will provide you with many interesting angles from which to approach this remarkable play, a work which beautifully illuminates the gifts-love, friendship, kindness-that make life truly worth living, through its probing and frequently poetic examination of one of humanity’s universal and defining experiences: death.\ Vivian Bearing, a renowned professor of literature who has spent years studying and teaching the famously intricate Holy Sonnets of the seventeenth-century poet John Donne, is diagnosed with advanced ovarian cancer. Confident of her ability to stay in control of events, she brings to her illness the same approach-intensely rational and painstakingly methodical-that has guided her stellar academic career. But as her disease and its painful treatment inexorably progress, she begins to question the single-minded values that have always guided her and, in the process, learns lessons that are both challenging and redemptive. In Wit, we are confronted with timeless questions: How should we live our lives knowing that we will die? Are our relationships with others more important than material, professional, or intellectual achievement? What, if any, are the roles of science and art in reconciling us to our mortality? With an unforgettable combination of elegant phrasing and emotional power, Wit compels us to reassess our own lives, just as Vivian Bearing must do.
\ From the Publisher“Among the finest plays of the decade . . . An original and urgent work of art.”—David Lyons, The Wall Street Journal\ “A dazzling and humane play you will remember till your dying day.”—John Simon, New York magazine\ “[A] brutally human and beautifully layered new play . . . You will feel both enlightened and, in a strange way, enormously comforted.”—Peter Marks, The New York Times\ “A one-of-a-kind experience: wise, thoughtful, witty and wrenching.”—Vincent Canby, The New York Times Year in Review\ “A thrilling, exciting evening in the theater . . . [Wit is] an extraordinary and most moving play.”—Clive Barnes, New York Post\ “Wit is exquisite . . . an exhilarating and harrowing 90-minute revelation.”—Linda Winer, Newsday\ “Edson writes superbly . . . [A] moving, enthralling and challenging experience that reminds you what theater is for.”—Fintan O’Toole, New York Daily News\ \ \ \ \ \ NY Times[A] brutally human and beautifully layered new play...you feel both enlightened and, in a strange way, enormously comforted.\ \ \ NY MagazineA dazzling and humane new play that you will remember till your dying day.\ \ \ \ \ John SimonA dazzling and humane play you will remember till your dying day. -- New York Magazine\ \ \ \ \ Donald LyonsAn original and urgent work of art . . . among the finest plays of the decade. -- The Wall Street Journal\ \ \ \ \ Peter Marks[A] brutally human and beautifully layered new play . . . you feel both enlightened and, in a strange way, enormously comforted. -- The New York Times\ \ \ \ \ Journal of the American Medical AssociationWhile the play's ferocious intensity may intimidate, its transformative power should be provocative and enlightening for those of us who must make life-and-death decisions for our patients.\ \
