Wit: A Play by Margaret Edson - Award-Winning Drama on Life, Death & Poetry | Perfect for Theater Lovers, Book Clubs & Literature Students

If poisonous minerals, and if that tree,Whose fruit threw death on else immortall us,If lecherous goats, if serpents enviousCannot be damn'd; Alas; why should I bee?...That remember them [i.e., his sins], some claime as debt,I think it mercy, if thou wilst forget.W;t is a clever play, starting with its title. For wit is the weapon the great metaphysical poet John Donne used in his sonnets to approach an unapproachable God and the protagonist of this play, Vivian Bearing, Ph. D., is a Donne scholar whose great book is a study of Donne's twelve Holy Sonnets. (The book is entitled Made Cunningly.) And the use of the semicolon in place of an `I' between the first and last letters of the title echoes a remembered conversation between Vivian, still an undergraduate student, and her soon to be mentor, E. M. Ashford, on the importance of punctuation in Donne's poems.And death shall be no more, comma, Death thou shalt 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 uncompromisingway, one learns something from this poem, wouldn't you say? Life, death. Soul, God. Past, present. Not insuperable barriers, notsemicolons, just a comma.(I suppose a comma would have looked wrong in the title typographically, but the use of the comma still carries forward the conceit of only an item of punctuation separating the beginning of something from the end, in this case, Vivian's life.)The play is cunningly put together, essentially a monologue that continues from beginning until near the very end of the play (Vivian's conversation with the audience about her treatment) interspersed with brief scenes of Vivian with her doctor, Vivian with the nurse and with the technicians, Vivian and the research fellow in medical oncology (who once took her course on the sonnets -"you can't get into medical school unless you're well-rounded") and scenes of remembrance Vivian as an undergraduate with her mentor, Vivian teaching). The play ends in a swirl of activity as Vivian's systems fail. So it's In (Vivian monologuing), Out (swirl of activity, interchanges with other characters), In, Out. It happens over and over again, until the final burst of activity, after which it all just . . . ends.One of the most interesting aspects of the play is the way it captures character. Vivian, ill, discovers that the research fellow, just like her in the classroom, cares less for the people he's caring for than the subject he's studying. But, bitterly ill now, Vivian wants him to care for her, needs care. And thus, responds to the decidedly unintellectual advances of her nurse, who at least accepts that it is part of her job to comfort the frightened and ailing.This is my playes last scene, here heavens appointMy pilgrimages last mile; and my raceIdly, yet quickly runne, hath this last pace,My spans last inch, my minutes last point,My body, `and my souleJohn Donne, 1609