The actual experience of seeing 'Wit,' however, is thrilling and part of the thrill is that the play is an experience; the evening has a sublime indivisibility and power that no account of particular can, finally, get at. It's not that the play is, or sets out to be, 'perfect' or seamless; on the contrary, it is written with deliberate self-consciousness, every line 'matters' in a ways that you can't fail to notice, and the play frequently calls your attention to its devices. That's its success, and that's is poignance: its devices mirror the human devices we see at work in the main character, in a way that highlights the essential tragedy and comedy of being human—devices are all we have and they're not enough.
The play begins abruptly and unceremoniously, in a stark hospital setting, with the shoving aside of a white curtain by Dr. Vivian Bearing, a professor and an unspecified university, who is wearing a hospital gown and a baseball cap, and is pushing and IV pole as she walks toward the audience. . . . The first few minutes of the play are giddily, awfully, hilarious. (They are, in fact, the essence of wit.) Bearing delivers a devastating disquisition on the true meaning –and ultimate pointlessness in her case- of the standard questions directed at hospital patients: 'How are you feeling today?'
If 'Wit' errs on the side of neatness, it is only in one respect, and that is the open-and-shut irony of Bearing's having a doctor who is too much like her, who is much more interested in research than he is in people: Dr. Posner (Alec Phoenix), a young research fellow under Dr. Kelekian, actually has to remind himself to ask his patient how she is feeling. Dr. Posner, who regards Bearing more or less as packaging -it's her cells he cares about- makes her realize for the first time how blithely she humiliated her students. And what do you know - he was once one of them."
Right up to the last second, 'Wit' has riches of acting, writing, and stagecraft that you revel in, even in the atmosphere of death, and it is directed with just the right touch by Derek Anson Jones. Its use of Donne's Holy Sonnet X –'Death Be Not Proud'- even pulls the poem out of the overheated, drowsy classroom of your past and into your active consciousness. (Imagine a play that made you feel newly fascinated by the Pledge of Allegiance.) Remarkably, 'Wit' is Edson's first play; she wrote it seven years ago, when she was thirty. Watching it isn't easy –it isn’t easy to watch human beings be tested, knowing they can only fail - and yet you feel that its lessons and pleasures amount to a second chance, to an amazing grace.
| This information is provided by the Wit Film Project. For more information please contact Jennifer Spooner at jennifer.spooner@med.va.gov or 310-478-3711 ext. 48353. |
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