Margaret Edson's "Wit' on Broadway

There's no reason you should recognize Vivian Bearing's name. It's hardly a household name, and she's not even a real person. She's a character in Margaret Edson's remarkable play, Wit, currently receiving a revival on Broadway starring Cynthia Nixon. But Vivian's struggle is both heroic and unforgettable "“ for in the end she vanquishes an enemy that others before her have not. That enemy is Death.

From the moment she appears on stage— bald, clad only in a hospital gown, pushing an intravenous drip on a rolling stand— Vivian Bearing is in command of the battle. She wastes no time in telling us so as she introduces herself. After all, she explains, she is a professor of 17th-Century metaphysical poetry, specializing in the Holy Sonnets of John Donne.

"I would prefer that a play about me be cast in the mythic-heroic-pastoral mode," she explains. "But The Fairie Queene this is not."

Far from it. Vivian Bearing is a 47-year-old woman with stage four metastatic ovarian cancer. And therein lies the rub.

In the next hour and 45 minutes, Vivian takes us through the paces of her illness with brisk, bracing authority, as if she's delivering a lecture. The action segues back and forth between Bearing's weeks in the hospital— during which she receives eight brutal doses of experimental chemotherapy— and flashbacks to her childhood, where we see the awakening of her love for literature and words.

Terrorizing students

We're also treated to flashbacks of several university classroom scenes, where we see this formidable professor in action, terrorizing her students with her uncompromising scholarly standards and lecturing on John Donne's sonnets as if her life depended on it (which it ultimately does).

What makes Bearing's journey bearable for us is the surprising humor that this jewel of the play affords (hence the title Wit, a metaphysical conceit and a poetic term used to describe Donne's technique). Vivian analyzes her illness with the same terminology and precision that she would employ to deconstruct a Donne sonnet. She spars with her physicians, using words as her weapons. As she submits to a humiliating pelvic examination given by a young attending physician who was actually her former student, we laugh and squirm along with her.

Bearing is played with acerbic wit by Cynthia Nixon, an actress well known to American audiences (from the HBO series "Sex and The City"). In contrast to Kathleen Chalfant's deeply moving portrayal in the play's 1998 premiere, and Emma Thompson's cerebral one (in the 2001 film), Nixon brings to the role the steely resolve of a fearless, timeless woman-warrior.

Channeling John Donne

Under the delicate and sensitive direction of Lynn Meadow, the play— with its ensemble of nine actors playing multiple roles— flows seamlessly from scene to scene, flashback to flashback, to a dazzling and unforgettably theatrical conclusion.

Wit derives its thesis from John Donne's Death be not proud, a sonnet that calls on the forces of intellect and drama to vanquish death. As an expert on this poem, Professor Bearing has deconstructed it countless times in the classroom and in scholarly journals.

Her own professor— E. M. Ashford, a rigorous scholar who appears in the play in a flashback— contends that the crux of the poem lies in the punctuation of the last line that varies from edition to edition: "And death shall be no more, Death thou shalt die."

Familiar journey

Ashford favors this version because, as Vivian explains: "Nothing but a breath"“ a comma "“ separates life from life everlasting." There lies the triumph of the sonnet "“ and of Margaret Edson's uplifting play.

Indeed, this first and only play written by a former Georgia kindergarten teacher can be a gift to many of us for whom Bearing's journey is all too familiar. I, for one, watched all three members of my family of origin die of cancer"“ my mother at 58, my father at 82, my brother at 51. Each struggled valiantly in a different way.

But Vivian Bearing's heroic triumph over Death provides more than solace. It offers a stunning vision of just how victorious our loved ones might have been, after all.