Rating: Summary: deserving winner of the pulitzer prize! Review: absorbing;powerful;moving;very high level of writing;great last scene. and these are my reactions to the reading of the play. it must be dynamite when performed on stage.p.s. take it from a 72 year old, this is a must read book and a must see play.
Rating: Summary: boring Review: "Wit" is elitist and pretentious. It is less than a half
Rating: Summary: An Amazing Work Of Theatre Review: One of the greatest things about live theater is how every now and then someone comes along and delivers a script that moves the art form ahead a few light years. W;t is exactly this kind of revolutionary work. I had the tremendous fortune to see it performed by the magnificent Kathleen Chalfant, and this show goes off inside of you like a depth-charge. It's a beautiful, moving piece about life and dignity -- a must-read that translates exceptionally well to the printed page. Read this script!!!
Rating: Summary: more than note worthy Review: i devoured this play in less than an hour, it had my attetion the moment i began. as a person struggling with a terminal illness, i could relate to vivan's need to make sense of her disease and as time progressed to reconcile her healthly persona with the person she had become, as she battled her illness. i think the reader/audience is made privy to a lot of " behind the sceenes" experinces a patient endures at the had of the medical profession in search of the "cure". take the time to read this. i doubt you'll be disappointed, or the same.
Rating: Summary: Eloquent and sharp--and yes, witty. Review: It's hard to believe that this eloquent and sharp--and yes, witty--play is the first major work by Margaret Edson. I haven't had the opportunity to see it performed, but it must be a captivating couple of hours. The part of Professor Vivian Bearing (a fine name) is rendered perfectly: a woman whose transformation from pedant to human being is thoroughly convincing--and a more than a little inspirational. Here's hoping that Margaret Edson is teaching some versions of the lessons of this play to her kindergarten students in Atlanta. And here's hoping, too, that she's at work on a new play!
Rating: Summary: WIT teaches us how to live in the new millenium. Review: This is a play about love and grace. I cried and laughed and lent it to everyone. It's brilliant funny. I can't wait until she writes anotherone. I know why Margaret Edson won the Pulitzer Prize.
Rating: Summary: Harrowing, transcendent drama Review: I just returned from a weekend in NYC where I saw this play, which won the Pulitzer Prize last week. It is, at the risk of sound hyperbolic, one of the most gripping, exciting, passionate, moving, and intellectually daunting evenings of theatre I have ever seen. I bought the book and reread it on the way home. While nothing can duplicate Kathleen Chalfant's brilliant performance as Vivian Bearing, it is a play that also lives extraordinarily well on the page. Read it--your understanding of life, death, poetry, medicine, the body, and the soul will never be the same.
Rating: Summary: Awards for WIT Review: Winner of the 1999 Pulitzer Prize in Drama for a distinguished play by an American author Winner of the Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Play of 1999
Rating: Summary: Unbelieveably close to home Review: Having witnessed the slow death of my mother from congestive heart failure and emphasyma, "Wit" brought home to me (with a gut sucker-punch) all of my own ordeal, not through MY experience, but through my mother's. Watching this, it was as though the writer, the director and Ms. Thompson (is there a FINER actress on the planet right now?) had mined my mother's brain unbeknownst to me as she lay dying in a hospital in order to show me - compassionately, humanely yet SO dramatically and angonizingly - the other side of death. One might have titled it "The Other Side of Dying".
One watches loved ones die and one is concentrated upon one's own grief and feelings; "Wit" takes you over the fence, makes you trod the ground over which the dying patient walks with increasingly faltering steps, right up until the end. "Wit" is not easy viewing; but - from the agonies of its main character, to the ineptutide and shocking lack of compassion by all the medical staff save Audra McDonald's character - it is necessary viewing in a time when insurance and the medical community say they care, but don't act as though they do. One is reminded that "pure research" can never be such, because its results flow from the faults and frailties of the human body and experience. A tour de force performance from a first-rate cast.
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.
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