“I wanted to write a show about grace,” says Margaret Edson, openly lesbian playwright of 1999 Pulitzer Prize winner, Wit. “How one person makes sense of her life as she looks to its end.”
By now, most of us are familiar with Edson’s resulting play of an all-too-collected intellectual who learns a lesson in humanity when terminal cancer—and a barrage of painful treatments administered by emotionally cold doctors—hits. And this month HBO brings those who aren’t the cable movie take on Edson’s literally singular vision, directed by Mike Nichols and starring Emma Thompson.
Chicago’s Goodman Theatre will stage Wit May 11-June 16.
“I wasn’t involved in casting at all, I wasn’t involved in making the film,” Edson, a kindergarten teacher at Atlanta’s John Hope Elementary School, states about the HBO film over the phone from her Georgia home. “I decided not to have any role in it at all, so I’m just watching it like everybody else. I thought it would be interesting to see what they would make of it on their own.”
In HBO’s figuring of Wit, Thompson plays Vivian Bearing, a renowned expert on 17th Century “Holy Sonnets” poet John Donne, and such an acerbically witty, perfectionist teacher that she alienates most of her students. She also lacks a social life, reserving all passion for the classroom and Donne instead. However, Vivian’s independence and academic, solitary existence is suddenly endangered when a diagnosis of terminal ovarian cancer is proffered by her physician, Dr. Kelekian (Christopher Lloyd). Aggressive experimental treatment is decided upon, administered by Dr. Jason Posner (Jonathan Woodward) Vivian’s former student-cum-clinical and obsessed protégé of Kelekian’s, and humanistic nurse Susia Monahan (Audra McDonald).
On HBO starting this weekend.