[In the following review of the off-Broadway production, Kanfer finds Wit to be an absorbing and witty play.]

The academy and the cancer ward share many of the same terms: “exam,” “study,” “test results,” “research,” “analysis,” “course.” Yet as playwright Margaret Edson demonstrates in her new drama, Wit, context is everything. In one arena the words concern illumination and explication; in another, they are a matter of life and death.

Vivian Bearing, PhD (Kathleen Chalfant), is familiar with both the university and the hospital. A professor of English Lit. specializing in the poetry of John Donne, she comes to an unnamed clinic suffering from advanced ovarian cancer. With great calm she addresses the audience, telling us what we will see, from the first phases of her treatment to her final day on earth. “It's highly educational,” she says dispassionately. “I am learning how to suffer.” Forewarned, we still cannot look away as she is slowly robbed of her independence, her dignity and, finally, her formidable intelligence.

Dressed in one of those hospital gowns designed for maximum humiliation, and hiding her chemotherapy-caused baldness beneath a red baseball cap, Bearing is the very essence of valor. Her specialist, Dr. Harvey Kelekian (Walter Charles), intends to treat the malignancy in an aggressive manner, armed with every surgical, chemical, biological, and radiological means at his command. In this battle he is aided by a brilliant young adjutant, intern Jason Posner (Alec Phoenix). Neither man is cruel by intent. But as they go about their business Bearing ceases to be an individual to them. She becomes, instead, a subject for experimentation. Under the onslaught she makes an effort to remain indomitable, taking comfort in the verse of her beloved 17th century sonneteer:

Death be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so,
For those whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow,
Die not, poor death, nor yet canst thou kill me.

As the treatments grow more drastic, Bearing's thoughts slip back to a childhood of reading to her distracted father. From there she wanders to undergraduate days when a college professor (Helen Stenborg) explicated a text—and pointed her life in a new direction:

PROFESSOR Ashford:
In the edition you chose, this profoundly simple meaning is sacrificed to hysterical punctuation:
And death—capital D—comma—shall be no more—semicolon!
Death—capital D—comma—thou shalt die—exclamation point!
If you go in for this sort of thing, I suggest you take up Shakespeare. Gardner's edition of the Holy sonnets reads: And death shall be no more comma. Death thou shall not die. Nothing but a breath—a comma—separates life from life everlasting. It is very simple, really. With the original punctuation restored, death is no longer something to act out on a stage, with exclamation points. It's a comma, a pause. This way, the uncompromising way, one learns something from this poem, wouldn't you say? Life, death, Soul, God. Past, present. Not insuperable barriers, not semicolons, just a comma.
BEARING:
Life, death … I see. It's a metaphysical conceit. It's wit!

So it is, and so is much of Edson's absorbing play. Within its intermissionless two hours ironies appear at every turn. Kelekian is an MD, Bearing is a PhD; one doctor seeks the newest facts, the other, the oldest verities. The intern was once the professor's student. He is proud of having received an A– in the Donne course—although when Posner went on to medical school he left his humanity back in the Humanities department. (After one particularly agonizing test Bearing wails, “I wish I had given him an A!”) The hospital claims to alleviate suffering, but the only mercy in evidence comes from an ill-educated nurse, Susie Monahan (Paula Pizzi). She at least keeps the hospital from using so-called “heroic” measures to save Bearing for a few more heartbeats, another procedure, an additional entry in the doctors' notes about terminal illness.

In the role of a lifetime, Chalfant (last seen in a variety of personae in Angels in America) holds the stage of the small MCC Theater off Broadway, vulnerable and exposed in every sense of the words. Her support could not be bettered; each performer is wholly convincing in medical and/or university roles. Derek Anson Jones has directed with sensitivity and scrupulous attention to detail, moving his cast in and out of rooms with the crispness of real Intensive Care Unit personnel. Myung Hee Cho's set shrewdly utilizes the curtains around hospital beds to effect scene changes. Ilona Somogyi's costumes are all too accurate, as is Michael Chybowski's pitiless lighting.

This is not a perfect evening. Edson is a new playwright and she seems anxious to include all she has experienced as a hospital worker in an oncological unit, and as a teacher in Atlanta. Everything is a bit too neat. Bearing, for example, is exactly a half-century old—not 49, not 51. She has no family to clutter up her life, and not a single friend visits her. In the end, en route to visit a great-grandchild, the aged Professor Ashford drops by to read a children's book. The Runaway Bunny may indeed have home truths as valuable as those in Donne's sonnets, but the scene is too contrived for credibility. Still, these are the forgivable mistakes of a tyro. With all its flaws, Wit is a distinguished debut, and a promising beginning for the '98-'99 season. Webster's defines wit as (1) “intellectual and perceptive powers”; and (2) “the ability to make lively, clever remarks in a sharp, amusing way.” Edson gets an A– on both counts.