Radio Theater: W;t by Margaret Edson ⭐⭐️⭐️⭐️☆

Margaret Edson

    We call ourselves Radio Theater, and most months we meet to read a play together outloud. Don't be deceived by the name, we have little invested in being performers.  The readings are occasions to catch up on each other's adventures, to eat and drink heartily, and to try on roles we don't get to play in everyday life. Some, like me, have been members for decades.  We kicked off our 2020 season January 25 with W;t (pronounced and sometimes spelled as Wit) by Margaret Edson.

    W;t won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1999.  Vivian Bearing, Ph.D., has metastatic ovarian cancer, and in an opening soliloquy, dressed in a hospital gown and bald from chemo, she tells the audience she expects to die in a couple of hours—and that her story contains elements of humor.  Then in a sequence of this-is-your-life scenes, we see her as a girl falling in love with language, as an earnest young scholar, as a demanding professor, and as a hospital patient.

    Vivian's dry humor is a treat.  In the intake interview, when asked what she does for exercise, she replies "pace."  In a classroom scene, a student starts asking for permission to turn in a paper late, and she interrupts saying "Don't tell me.  Your grandmother died"; request denied.  When she is placed in sterile isolation because her immune system is compromised, she explains that all life forms could potentially do her harm.  Then Jason Posner, MD, enters the room, and she adds "particularly medical professionals."

    Jason does medical research, and he's very smart; as a student he took Vivian's famously difficult Donne class, and got an A-.  Yet Vivian does not embrace him as a kindred spirit.  For one thing, she isn't thrilled with the idea of a former student giving her a pelvic exam. And Jason is absurd; he needs to prompt himself with the word "clinical" to remember the little human flourishes, like saying "Hello, how are you," when he enters Vivian's room.  The spell doesn't persist; his brusque phrase for excusing himself from Vivian's bedside to return to his research is "gotta go." And Jason is truly, deeply, cold. In the final scene, Vivian is unconscious, and when he sees by her fluid output that her kidneys have failed, he says "it won't be long now." In the same way he might note the dwindling numbers on a microwave oven display.

    Vivian's fave at the hospital is Susie Monahan, RN, who she even lets calls her "sweetheart." Susie is the only person so honored: Vivian is single; her parents are dead; she has only one visitor at the hospital, and when she comes in for her final stay, she takes a cab.  Susie provides a needed sparkle of warmth in Vivian's life. She's no intellectual, but when Vivian is scared and nauseous, and Susie brings her a popsicle to sooth her GI tract, it's the perfect gesture at the perfect time.  And Susie is not all heart, fortunately.  In that same popsicle scene, Susie talks from her head, persuading Vivian to sign a Do Not Resuscitate (DNR) directive and avoid pointless medical heroics.

    Vivian herself was definitely not a warm campus presence.  Donne, the audience learns, is famous for confronting the Big Questions armed only with his wit — giving us one clue to the play's title. In one classroom scene, a student asks if Donne was hiding behind his wit, making things clever and complicated to hide his fear of death.  The scene ends with the question hanging in the air.

    Another flashback makes an explicit plea for a Head/Heart alliance, and explains the semicolon in the play's title.  Vivian is studying under the great E. M. Ashford, and E.M. makes her rewrite a paper on the Death, be not proud sonnet.  E.M. favors the authentic Donne edition with the last line Death shall be no more, Death thou shalt die. The two clauses joined by a humble comma, Donne's way of recognizing the unity of life with the stillness that surrounds it.  But Vivian used an edition that renders the last line as Death shall be no more; Death thou shalt die!  Per E.M., this sacrifices Donne's natural meaning on the altar of "hysterical punctuation."  Vivian offers to go immediately to the library and rewrite, and E.M. says she'd understand more by going and enjoying herself with friends.  Vivian wonders at the relationship between simple human truth and uncompromising scholarly standards, but at the time she doesn't follow up.

    After the flashbacks, Vivian lies very sick and addled in her hospital bed.  E.M. comes to visit, and in another perfect gesture, takes off her shoes and climbs in beside her.  Would Vivian like her to recite Donne? "Noooo."  So instead, E.M. reads her a children's book called The Runaway Bunny, about belonging, about what home means.  The bunny realizes his mom's implacable love will follow him wherever he might go, and decides to stay put; his mom ends the tale by saying "Have a carrot."  Not terribly witty, but E.M. says "perfect" to herself when she finishes reading the story.