Wit
Playwright Margaret Edson constructed Wit, her first play, with every tool in the ironist’s shed. Protagonist Vivian Bearing, a Donne scholar stricken with ovarian cancer, repeatedly steps outside the narrative to make snappy comments to the audience. Her monologues positively groan with literary references, as if to remind us that this is after all only a play, a text, “black marks on white paper.” The unity of time is completely abandoned as the days expand but the months contract. Yet the aim of all this postmodernism is the deconstruction of irony, a demonstration that wit–deliberately creating distance from the human condition–is an insufficient response to life’s gravest trials. More meaningful than wit, however “maudlin” or “corny,” is Vivian’s direct engagement with others: listening to her mentor read a story, sharing a Popsicle with her nurse. (Notwithstanding her 1999 Pulitzer, Edson is similarly immersed in her job teaching kindergartners, helping them learn the linguistic code that mediates so many of our connections.)
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In any case, it’s unlikely the audience will find Vivian any more repellent than her fellow characters do. Scott enhances this sense of common experience between the watchers and the watched by having designer Rita Pietraszak light the house nearly as often as the stage. This serves to make the audience complicit in the doctors’ unfeeling arrogance but also empathic with Vivian’s pain. Again that call for community: the gulf between audience and actors, like the gulf between life and death, seems unbridgeable but isn’t. It’s not a semicolon, only a comma.
