Wit 2016 - Softcover
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Review:
Wit is that rare beast: art that engages both the heart and the mind. "It is not my intention to give away the plot," Vivian Bearing, Ph.D., announces near the beginning of Margaret Edson's Pulitzer Prize-winning play, "but I think I die at the end. They've given me less than two hours." For two hours, this famed Donne scholar takes center stage, interrupting her doctors, nurses, and students to explicate her own story, its metaphors and conceits. Recently diagnosed with late-stage ovarian cancer, she is being treated with an experimental drug cocktail administered in "eight cycles. Eight neat little strophes." The chemo makes her feel worse than she ever thought possible; in fact, the treatment is making her sick, not the disease--an irony she says she'd appreciate in a Donne sonnet, if not so much in life.
From the Publisher:
Throughout, Vivian finds, the doctors study and discuss her body like a text: "Once I did the teaching, now I am taught. This is much easier. I just hold still and look cancerous. It requires less acting every time." As her time draws to a close, a sea change begins to work in the way Vivian thinks about life, death, and indeed, Donne. His complex, tightly knotted poems have always been a puzzle for her formidable intellect, a chance to display "verbal swordplay" and wit. Her sickness presents an entirely different challenge. A powerful, prickly personality, capable of dry asides even during a bout of gut-wrenching nausea ("You may remark that my vocabulary has taken a turn for the Anglo-Saxon"), Vivian develops a new appreciation for the simple, the maudlin, the kind. Not to give away the plot, but the final moments in Margaret Edson's debut are as wrenching--as human--as anything in recent drama. --Mary Park
Now the basis for an HBO film starring Emma Thompson, Christopher Lloyd, Eileen Atkins, Audra McDonald, Jonathan Woodward, and Harold Pinter, and directed by Mike Nichols, airing in March and April 2001.
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
- PublisherNICK HERN BOOKS
- Publication date2016
- ISBN 10 184842552X
- ISBN 13 9781848425521
- BindingPaperback
- Number of pages80
- Rating
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Wit (NHB Modern Plays)
Published by
Nick Hern Books, United Kingdom, London
(2016)
ISBN 10: 184842552X
ISBN 13: 9781848425521
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Book Description Paperback. Condition: Very Good. A striking and sharply funny reflection on the frailty of existence and the complex relationship between knowledge and love. Winner of the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. A celebrated but exacting professor of metaphysical poetry, Vivian Bearing has been diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer. It seems her life is nearing its final chapter. As she submits herself to an experimental treatment, Vivian approaches her illness with the same uncompromising rigour she brings to bear on the sonnets of John Donne. And through it all she comes to reassess her life and her work with profundity and a moving wry humour. Margaret Edson's Pulitzer Prize-winning Wit was first performed in 1995. It was revived at the Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester, in 2016, with Julie Hesmondhalgh. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged. Seller Inventory # GOR009765250
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