In this extraordinary play, American playwright Margaret Edson has created a work that is as intellectually challenging as it is emotionally immediate.
At the start of Wit, Vivian Bearing, Ph.D., a renowned professor of English who has spent years studying and teaching the brilliantly difficult Holy Sonnets of the meta-physical poet John Donne, has been diagnosed with terminal ovarian cancer. Her approach to her illness is not unlike her approach to the study of Donne: aggressively probing and intensely rational.
But during the course of her illness - and her stint as a prized patient in an experimental chemotherapy program at a major teaching hospital - Vivian comes to reassess her life and her work with a profundity and humour that are transformative both for her and the audience.
