The American Community Theatre gave a powerful rendition of the Margaret Edson's multiple award-winning play Wit that portrays the tortuous death of a scholar in a research hospital. In its course, it explores a number of key metaphysical questions about life, death and God and in the end provides a balanced solution to the paradox that characterizes the human condition.
Jessica Lefkow gave a compelling performance playing the part of Vivian Bearing, an accomplished academic and professor on the 17th century poet John Donne. The play outlines the course of a 12-month period while Bearing is undergoing aggressive chemotherapy for advanced ovarian cancer in a research hospital.
The protagonist takes the audience back to various scenes in her memory. Her medical predicament that she describes as “confronting the final examination but not understanding the question and running out of time” is highlighted by a flash-back interaction with her undergraduate students. In it, the students challenge the purpose of Donne’s puzzling and heavy treatment of life’s fundamental issues -- arguing that such scholars are merely hiding from these problems by creating puzzles which they have no intention to solve.
Considered to be one of the greatest of the English Metaphysical poets, John Donne was known for his vivacious, compelling style and thorough examination of mortal paradox. Donne's sacred sonnets were brief but intense meditations, characterized by the striking use of wit, irony and wordplay.
Ironically for Bearing who dedicated her life's work to research, her life’s painful end is being clinically researched. Towards the end of her cancer treatment, the doctors and medical researchers grew increasingly insensitive to Bearing's suffering while she comes to rely on a kind-hearted nurse for comfort and simple pleasures. As a stark contrast to her strict and highly disciplined life as an academic, she dies in the arms of her former professor who reads to her not the allusive poetry of Donne but a simple children's parable.
The cast was highly effective in conveying the complex messages of the play. The props, set, costumes and lighting were simple and effective. The setting of the small theatre space lent intimacy and exerted impact on the audience. The tight-knitted production burst with humour, pathos and dramatic force.
When the fervor of research overtakes the concern for humanity, Bearing felt treated like “a specimen jar” rather a person. It turns out that a nurse who knows nothing about big words and a children’s parable are what provided her with kindness and peace in her final days. The play is a powerful reminder that we can become human again if we step down from pompousness to face mortality and snub death – quoting Donne: And death shall be no more, Death thou shall die.
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