Stage Review
'Wit' rewarding despite complex metaphor

‘Wit’ 2 p.m. Sundays through March 11 Richardson Theatre, Fort Shafter $8 general admission 438-4480, 438-5230

It’s not likely that you’ll see a production of Margaret Edson’s "Wit" at any of the major theaters in town. It simply wouldn’t sell tickets. But it’s just the right choice for the Matinee Readers Theatre series on Sunday afternoons at Fort Shafter.

The play is a long one-act, centering around a character in the final stages of treatment for incurable ovarian cancer. While it is not unnecessarily graphic, it does contain some difficult, painful scenes that some theatergoers may prefer to avoid.

But there’s a great deal to recommend in the script, and in the excellent reading offered by director Vanita Rae Smith and her competent cast. The show is intelligent, challenging and thought-provoking for an audience willing to listen closely and attend to its complex interplay of ideas.

Jo Pruden reads the central role of Vivian Bearing, a respected college professor specializing in 16th-century British literature, particularly in the metaphysical sonnets of John Donne. Vivian has been a disciplinarian and a hard task master for her undergraduate students, demanding their rigorous study and strict attention to detail.

For her, there is no easy way. So when presented with her cancer diagnosis, she opts for difficult and radical chemotherapy, although by reading between the lines of her physician’s comments, she knows a cure is hopeless.

But her brightest students almost capture the elusive reason that Donne’s poetry is so complex. "He makes Shakespeare read like a Hallmark card." They label it as his "salvation anxiety."

Donne wrote increasing levels of complexity, not so much to solve as to quantify the puzzle of redemption. But if lesser minds thought about the meaning of life all the time, "they’d surely go nuts."

So unraveling Donne’s poetry becomes a metaphor for Vivian’s battle with cancer. She comes to know that there will be a final exam on this material, and that being extremely smart won’t take care of it. The end - and it can’t be helped - will be corny. She can only hope that it will be a time of simplicity and kindness.

Pruden hits all the right buttons in her delivery of Vivian’s journey as a search for wit in her final days, a metaphysical puzzle to hide behind, but one ultimately improved by brevity.

She strains to maintain personal pride despite demeaning medical treatment. She endures the hospital’s grand rounds and finds "the attention flattering for the first five minutes, like a poem feels." Her body becomes a book for the researchers to study in a process somewhere between grand opera and a graduate seminar.

Supporting roles are ably read by Richard Pellett as the doctor, Dion Donahue as the young intern and Shari Lynn in the dual roles of caring nurse and academic mentor.

We find ourselves rooting for Vivian, both in her struggle to retain life and to separate from it. There are immensely strong, personal moments: her gynecological exam by a former student, her patience with dehumanizing treatments and a late, but touching reunion with her former professor.

"Wit" is not an easy piece, but the most rewarding ones seldom are.

[back to top]