Wit

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Cynthia Nixon on Broadway as Vivian Bearing in Margaret Edson's Wit
Cynthia Nixon, playing the lead in the Broadway revival ofMargaret Edson’s play, Wit, does aheroic job putting her own mark against Kathleen Chalfant’s signatureperformance as the dying Vivian Bearing, the professor and scholar who meetsthe only fight she can’t win in her struggle with ovarian cancer.
In fact, by the time her cancer is diagnosed, Prof. Bearing is asgood as dead.  At stage four, the canceris already metastasizing and her treatment will mostly benefit science ratherthan herself.  But in perhaps her one selflesschoice, according to a script that finds its heroine mostly distasteful, Viviansigns up to undergo a rigorous eight-month treatment that doesn’t save herbody, but in most ways saves her soul.
Bearing is hardly a sympathetic character.  By acquiescingto be the subject of research instead of a researcher herself, she learns that there’smore to life than finding new knowledge.  The long hospital stay that ends herlife is her last lesson in how to have the relationships that she regularly deniedherself, devoting her time to the obscure and difficult sonnets of John Donneinstead.
Edson’s play, which won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, wants to have it both ways.  It indicts a medicalestablishment that sacrifices the humanity of its patients to its quest fortheir cure, but at same time indicts its patient, who’s devoted her own life to a similar kind of exacting and dehumanizing (at least in Edson’s version)research.
Chalfant played this sacrificial character with a dignity andnuance that made her a truly tragic figure. Vivian learns too late in her life that she can relate to people insteadof just teaching them, and that human feelings are more ennobled by living themthan by engaging them on the page.
Publicity material of Kathleen Chalfant in the 1998 Off-Broadway production
Through direct address to the audience from her hospital bed,Vivian lays out the story of her life and her sudden illness, describing howher father rewarded her zeal for reading, and how her own intellectuallysignificant female professor inspired her to ever better research andwriting.  Her tone is mordant and a bitself-deprecating, as though she’s embarrassed to think back on her trajectoryfrom its sorry end.
In the right hands, Vivian can be an engaging and self-awarenarrator of her life’s excesses and can suggest that hers are just a differentvariation on those we all suffer.  But asdirected for laughs by Lynne Meadow, Nixon’s Vivian is a bit strident, her humor too forced and ironic, until themorphine finallycalms her down toward the play’s end.  She finds her humanity just as the medicalestablishment reaches the epitome of its objectification of her body.  But Vivian is such an unlikable characteruntil then that it’s hard to see her story as anything but a joke at theexpense of a smart woman who’s happily chosen to devote her life to her work,however esoteric.
Prof. Bearing's work is played as too much of a joke in this production
Nixon is a smart performer, and emotionally enough intune with the role that she does strike nice chords of sympathy with Prof. Bearing.  And clearly the cancer narrative appeals toher.  At a moment when so many women (includingNixon, who’s a survivor) are diagnosed with breast, ovarian, and other cancers,a play that addresses their situation with the frankness of Wit is very welcome on Broadway.
It’s just too bad that Edson asks us to think only about howlittle agency women have in their own medical care.  That, perhaps, marks her play's age—witness therecent uproar over the lack of women testifying before Congress about theirproposed legislation on women’s reproductive health, which might indicate how fed up women have become with just the kind of objectification and powerlessness that Edson’splay indicts.  But a play thatalso allows audiences to laugh at the righteous pursuit of a life of the mindthat Vivian Bearing’s career represents compromises its otherwise feminist intent.
In this Broadway revival, Suzanne Bertish brings terrific verve toher role as Vivian’s inspiring professor. She relishes the knowledge she imparts to her pupil, and then demonstratesutmost compassion when she finds Vivian again at the end of her life.  When she crawls into Vivian’s hospital bed toread to her former star student, the moment is wrenching, not just because allshe has at hand to read aloud is a children’s book she recently shared with hergrandson, but because she loves and respects Vivian for who she is.
The professor's compassion at the end bears no moral judgment,which is so palpable in the rest of the play.  She brings only a clear love and felt presencethat finallyushersVivian out of her life and into a kind of peace.
This production ends as the original did, with Vivian’sresurrection of sorts after the death that finally, supposedly, frees her fromphysical and spiritual pain.  Downstageright, Nixon unfolds from an embryonic ball of limbs and flesh into atriumphal, extended human “V,” naked and, I suppose, liberated.
The moment is a bit too stark for my taste and too symbolic of theempty freedom that Vivian’s release into what Donne called the “pause” that isdeath brings.  She holds her arms aboveher head in a peculiar, Pyrrhic victory.  But her naked body seems also to signal howshe sacrificed her physical desire for her intellectual ambitions.  It’s the wrong kind of triumph to celebrate,and leaves the play rather hollow at the end.
Nonetheless, it’s good to see Nixon claiming Broadway real estateto perform a serious play written by a woman. Edson never wrote another play after Wit,and still insists she has no intention of returning to the form.  She continues to teach at an elementaryschool in Atlanta; Wit was the onedramatic story she wanted to tell.
Given new oncology protocols, the play feels dated, though itscritique of medicine’s essential inhumanity remains sadly relevant.  Its portrait of a female professoras brittle and emotionally stunted still smarts.
When do we get to see a story about a smart, talented womanintellectual who’s not punished by a fatal disease?  These stories have been tiresome since Wit was first produced in New York inthe ‘90s.
I’m always glad when work by andstarring talented women is visible in public forums, but how I wish wecould hear stories that celebrate instead of implicitly denigrate theiraccomplishments, and that let them thrive instead of fade.
The Feminist Spectator
Wit, on Broadway through March 17th.