Elegant 'Wit' shows toll of cancer
Vivian Bearing personifies our greatest fears.
Solitude. Pain. Death.
Diagnosed with advanced ovarian cancer, the 50-year-old literature professor around whom playwright Margaret Edson wraps her considerable "Wit" finds herself alone and racked with pain at the end of her life, enduring the indignity of an insidious disease and an experimental treatment that prolongs her death but will not cure her.
Edson's plot is simple. Her play is dense. Terse and provocative, it's a life-and-death-and-redemption drama that chronicles how a woman who has lived a life of the mind learns the value of compassion and kindness.
More Coverage Video Gift Theatre's 'Wit'
Edson's Pulitzer Prize-winning play is as intellectually rigorous and as elegantly constructed as 17th-century poet John Donne's Holy Sonnets, the field to which its central character - the proud, prickly and altogether brilliant Doctor Bearing - has devoted her life. Demanding, it's the kind of role from which tour-de-force performances come. Alexandra Main, star of John Gawlik's superb revival for Chicago's Gift Theatre, delivers such a performance.
A member of the Gift ensemble, Main plays Vivian with nuance and tenacity. She is luminous (a point underscored by John Horan's subtly clarifying lighting) as a demanding, self-contained woman who - like her beloved Donne - uses wit to insulate herself. The pale, slender Main makes sympathetic this formidable woman who addresses cancer with the same rigor and precision with which she analyzes a poem.
To watch the disease diminish her - to see Main's jaw clench, her wide eyes fill with unshed tears and her wit desert her - is heartbreaking to behold. And the point at which the pain overwhelms her, makes for one of the most gut-wrenching moments I've seen onstage in some time.
Pairing emotionally shattering scenes with comedic asides, Edson achieves an artful balance of humor and heartbreak in the play, which unfolds on Courtney O'Neill's minimal, clinical set as a series of vignettes dramatizing the professor's intellectual evolution and her physical decline. Over the intermissionless 90 minutes, we glimpse Vivian at her father's knee where her love of language begins; in her classroom where she rightfully earns her reputation as a tough teacher; in the examining room where she is reduced to a specimen for research purposes; and in her hospital bed where she finally experiences a bit of grace.
But "Wit" does more than chronicle one woman's journey toward self-awareness. It also indicts the medical profession for the way it treats the sick and dying and for the terrible price patients pay for medical progress. Not so ironically, Vivian's primary doctor Harvey Kelekian (Chuck Spencer) and his clinical fellow Jason Posner (a perfectly pitched and infuriatingly detached Kenny Mihlfried) are much like her. That's especially true of Jason, a former student of Vivian's, who, like her, prefers research to human interaction. He dissects her the same way she dissects a sonnet: with clinical detachment and perfunctory courtesy. The sole expression of genuine sympathy comes from her nurse Susie, played with plain-spoken dignity and a comforting Southern lilt by Anna Carini, as the very picture of empathy. Susie's intellect doesn't equal Vivian's, but her concern for her patient's welfare is unmatched. Rounding out the cast is Patricia Donegan's Professor E.M. Ashford, Vivian's mentor and fellow Donne expert, who provides comfort in a most unexpected and moving way.
And in the end, it's not Donne's metaphysical musings that soothe Vivian's battered soul, but the unadorned sentiment of Margaret Wise Brown's "The Runaway Bunny" and a simple expression of love.
'Wit'
Rating: 4 stars
Location: Gift Theater, 4802 N. Milwuakee Ave., Chicago
Times: 7:30 p.m. Thursdays to Saturdays, 2:30 p.m. Sundsays through July 6.
Tickets: $20, $25
Box Office: 773 283-7071 or thegifttheater.org
Rating:For adults.