Rating: 
Summary: Wonderfully written
Review: Vivian is an English professor and an expert of John Donne's Holy Sonnets. Not being familiar with these sonnets, I found myself silently repeating the phrases in order to make sense what they meant. It was a great learning experience. Vivian is a quiet, comtemplative and lonely woman who enters the cold sterile world of medical research after being told she has ovarian cancer. Her perceptions of what she experiences are interwoven with her knowledge of literature. She is humorous and witty about what is said to her during her final stage of life. I loved this book and was fortunate to watch the play on HBO with Emma Thompson. Please read this and than watch the play. It is truly a great experience
Rating:
Summary: Great play
Review: Dr. Vivian Bearing is renowned throughout the literary world for her expertise on John Donne's seventh century Holy Sonnets. The professor enjoys teaching at the University, but not as much as she relishes a rational analysis of Donne's brilliant work. However, the fiftyish Vivian soon learns that she suffers from late stage ovarian cancer. The University medical research staff provide her a rare opportunity to receive special experimental treatment. She soon finds herself feeling sicker from the "cure" than the disease even as she discovers that it is simpler to learn than to teach. As Vivian goes through the eight stage process, she begins to appreciate the Donne sonnets as simple works of art by a great metaphysical poet, and not just intellectual fodder to be ripped asunder by English teachers like her. W;T is an incredible play that forces the audience (reader or attendee) to evaluate ones values. The main theme is brutally honest yet done in a humorous, thought provoking manner. Margaret Edson provides one of the top plays of the decade as it leaves everyone agreeing it deserved the Pulitzer it won. This play (in book or theater form) needs to be experienced to understand the emotions its generates. Great work by a master playwright.
Rating:
Summary: Book better than TV version.
Review: I had previously only seen the TV version with Emma Thompson. But here's how New Yorker magazine described the TV version: "Anyone who makes the effort to transfer a play to TV runs the risk of focusing excessively on plot and dialogue and of failing to catch the elusive nonverbal elements in his butterfly net. This is what happened with the TV version of 'Wit'... Most of the deliberately self-conscious stage devices, which were integral to the play, and necessary to give full dimension the main character, were gone, and the TV version became largely a story about an interesting woman dying of cancer". Even though the TV version was excellent, the book version was better. I strongly recommend the book to anyone who's only seen the TV version.
Rating:
Summary: honest, moving, and sharp witted humor
Review: I thoroughly enjoyed this play. It is a quick read. Very funny. And even more poignant. It makes me want to go out and study the poetry of John Donne. It is a truthful telling of the medical world and how some doctors see their patients as "research", but it is also this approach to her which causes our heroine to reapproach her study of Donne in a more personal and less academic light. With her own experience of life and death she finally gains deeper understanding of the metaphysical poet. This is a heartbreaker. Anyone who has lost a loved one to cancer, or saw them through the fight against it, will be greatly affected by this play. And those rare and privileged few who have not know anyone with this dreadful illness will still be touched. Despite its sometimes seemingly cold hearted jabs, which make it all the more funny, this play is full of the warmth of love and grief and joy. Read it to know what I mean.
Rating:
Summary: Perfection
Review: This play is nothing short of beautiful. I read W;t this afternoon, and it was the most genuinely moving, heart-wrenching work of art that I have yet encountered. Written with the utmost eloquence and truth (and, of course, wit), Ms. Edson creates an utterly facinating and spirited character in Vivian Bearing, a brilliant, hard-nosed professor of 17th century poetry, specifically the Holy Sonnets of John Donne, who is diagnosed with fourth stage ovarian cancer. I insist that everyone either get your tickets for W;t at the Union Square Theatre or go to your local bookseller and pick up a copy of the play. It is one that you will never forget.
Rating:
Summary: A cast member speaks...
Review: As an original cast member of the play I can firmly tell you that this heart wrenching intelligent masterpiece was not only gut wrenching and heart warming to read but just as hard to portray a character without crying or laughing as I worked on the stage. In the final moments of the play (not to be discussed here), I was grateful for the director's choice for my character to look down, because not a night went by that I didn't drop a tear. I cannot say that I had a large part, but did have enough of a glimpse into Edson's thought processes and her own reality to see why "Wit" is the wonderful play you will read if you purchase it here. I feel very special to have been just a small insignificant part of her well told story. I'm very proud of Margaret and so is SCR.
Rating:
Summary: What Not To Do and Why To Do It Anyway
Review: Playwright Margaret Edson does everything in this play that playwrighting and directing teachers tell their students not to do. She speaks in jargon. She breaks the fourth wall. She demands a hefty cast. She's digressive. Yet the play, both in performance and as literature, is compelling. This play, in the great expressionist style, creates a world as seen through the eyes of only one character. Events unfold from a distinct point of view that is made comprehensible to us by allowing that POV to address us apart from stage events. Edson, a literature graduate and former oncology ward worker, is knowledgeable about the topics that inform this play: classic poetry and cancer. The connection between the metaphysical lyrics of John Donne and the imminent mortality of uterine cancer provide a smooth harmony in the character of Dr. Vivian Bearing. Thematically and structurally, this play has the theatrical elements that make playwrights from Sophocles to Strindburg to Sam Shepard writers of great significance. This isn't to say the play is easy to stage. Scene shifts take place without a pause to let actors get their feet. Our narrator gets a pelvic exam in full view of the audience. Supporting characters double on the fly, and lead characters have to change ages from scene to scene. At the final moments, our narrator appears in front of us as naked as the day she was born. But these difficult elements contribute to the great meaning that is this play. Without these trials, the production wouldn't touch us in the same way. We need these almost offensive structural components to understand what the narrator must endure. This play is difficult to read, difficult to stage, difficult to watch. Yet the things that make it difficult make it most ultimately rewarding. A modern classic from a forward-thinking mind.
Rating:
Summary: "It is not my intention to give away the plot",
Review: Dr. Vivian Bearing states at the beginning of the play but she does anyway. Though at the start this may not break your heart by the end of Vivian's journey it does. She is a woman who spent her life studying and teaching Donne's metaphysical poetry now she is the one being taught. She has to learn what the cancer inside of her is doing but most importantly she learns to be afriad and human. At the end of Ms. Edson's moving play the reader is left wishing there was a different end for Vivian. This play is definitely worth the read!
Rating:
Summary: Brilliant
Review: Reading plays is somewhat of an art.
Most plays are not nice to read since dialogue will usually feel flat and stage directions usually leave a lot to the imagination of both actors and directors, requiring additional concentration to picture what is really going on.
Wit is one of those plays that is a pleasure to read even for anyone not used to read them. Part of this is that Wit is mainly a big monologue that tells us the current predicament of the main character while still giving us small glimpses of her previous life.
And unlike so many works in these days and age, it is also a play that has something to say. As One Flew Over The Cookoo's Nest was a sharp criticism on mental institutions, so will Wit remain a real slap in the face for modern medicine and hospital care. And alas... something will unfortunately ring true no matter what country you live in. I did not have the chance to see the Mike Nichol's adaptation with Emma Thompson, so I cannot say how it compares.
Rating:
Summary: Beyond Belief
Review: I have never read such a beautiful play. Margaret Edson writes an intelligent treatment of a highly gifted John Donne scholar, Vivian Bearing, who enters a new life situation and finds herself completely inept spiritually. The new plane of existence is terminal cancer. If you are looking for an engaging plot, don't buy or read this play. This is a drama for the mind. The play is also extremely witty (no pun intended). It's worldview is basically Christian, because of its resounding affirmation of the goodness of human life, and the brutalities wreaked by self-centredness. This drama also deals with the issue of what constitutes good scholarship. Is good scholarship just a "way of quantifying the complexities of the puzzle" (in the words of the young post-doc researcher, Jason Posner), or does good scholarship give us a vital way of answering old questions? This is also a play in praise of simplicity. When Vivian Bearing is on her deathbed, she recoils in horror at the thought of her old professor reciting one of the Holy Sonnets. Instead, the wizened old professor reads Vivian a children's story, a little "allegory of the soul: Wherever you go God will find it." God finds Vivian's soul, but only after she has been stripped of her old pretentions and arrogance. I have never read such a beautiful literary depiction of genuine spiritual conversion (with the possible exception of Dostoevsky's Raskolnikov). You cannnot call yourself a well-read person unless you've read this play. This drama will be read for centuries hence. You can also buy a good film version on Amazon, which was released in 2000, casting Emma Thompson as Vivian Bearing (one of her best roles, I believe), and the lovely, talented Audra McDonald as her primary nurse.
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