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by Margaret Edson, directed by Glynis Leyshon

Canadian Stage/Vancouver Playhouse, Bluma Appel Theatre, Toronto

February 15-March 10, 2001

“Ask not for whom the bells tolls” ... because it’s obvious

Seana McKenna's performance as the dying poetry professor in Margaret Edson's Pulitzer Prize-winning "Wit" presents us with that strange paradox of a great performance in a not so great play.  The figure of a dying articulate person in the antiseptic environment of a hospital is so prone to cliché, one wonders why playwrights or audiences are still drawn to it.  

People at the turn of the 18th century were obsessed with the figure of the Dying Poet, like Goethe's Werther or Vigny's Chatterton.  Poets no longer have the cachet they once did, but dying does.  So, at the end of the 20th century we find an obsession with the Dying Wit.  The basic irony in both figures is really the same--a highly perceptive, intellectual mind trapped in a decaying body and acutely aware of the irony of its captivity.  The main representatives of this subgenre--like "Whose Life Is It Anyway?", numerous AIDS dramas and innumerable disease-of-the-week movies--are relentlessly dreary because the arc of each plot is necessarily the same and the emotional responses preprogrammed. 

"Wit" (written in 1991, first performed in 1995) mostly rises above the clichés of this subgenre by recognizing them as clichés.  Its main character, Vivian Bearing, begins the play by speaking to the audience and telling us she has less than two hours to live (i.e., the length of the play).  Such frequently direct addresses, comments on scenes she plays as scenes in "her play" and her anticipating what we expect, as per the genre, to happen next provide much-needed comic relief and the metatheatricality is appropriate to a play where so much of the imagery is drawn from so pointedly a self-aware poet as John Donne. 

However, just because the play calls attention to itself as yet another play about the central speaker dying, doesn't mean it is not manipulative.  Edson gives us feminist stereotypes not characters.  Bearing's primary physician, his fellow and her father are all self-absorbed and uncaring.  The physician and fellow treat her overtly as an object of research not as a person.  Bearing's female professor and the nurse, however, are just the opposite.  The insensitive fellow ignores Bearing's "Do not resuscitate" order while the  sensitive nurse defends it.  In the classroom scene one male student is stupid while one female student is bright.  The only corrective to this is that Bearing herself realizes she was often too hard on her students, though that confession seems minor compared to the coarseness with which the doctors treat her.  Bearing also says that the doctors are dealing with her as objectively as she did John Donne's poetry--she has become their poem--but the trendy text-as-body metaphor doesn't counteract the simplistic division of morality along gender lines built into the play.  Ronnie Burkett gives his marionettes better rounded personalities than Edson gives human actors.    

Edson wants us to feel Bearing's extreme loneliness but has contrived an improbable situation.  Despite being in hospital for eight months, Bearing has only one visitor, and then only near the end--her old teacher who has found out only by accident that she is there.  Although Bearing has said she has no family and no one to notify in case of emergency, how can she have taught at a university for so many years and become famous and yet have no friends, no acquaintances, no colleagues or even any students, past or present, who like her enough to visit her?  The answer is, of course, that Edson has simplified things to make Bearing's situation more pathetic.  Except for her now-dead father and her former professor, Edson doesn't want to confuse the issue "a woman confronts her death" with extraneous characters.  But the result is that we know virtually nothing about this woman who speaks to us for 100 minutes except that she is a dying professor who specializes in Donne's "Holy Sonnets".  We actually know more about Beckett's non-intellectual Winnie as she confronts her bizarre demise than we do about Edson's would-be realistic professor.

Edson's insistence on the theatrical metaphor and her allowing Bearing self-conscious irony as her sole characteristic only shifts our interest away from the story itself and entirely on to the acting of it.  Canadian Stage (and its co-producer the Vancouver Playhouse) are very lucky to have Seana McKenna as Vivian Bearing, a role she plays as if it were written for her.  It is a magnificent performance, perhaps her finest ever.  McKenna builds her character from the ground up, without relying on previous roles as she sometimes has in the past.  Her timing of Bearing's humorous remarks is perfect.  Her painful gradual decline, both physical and verbal, is presented in minutely observed stages.  This is all the more impressive because Edson's self-conscious script requires her continually to break the mood with direct addresses to the audience.

The rest of the cast do the best they can with their underwritten parts.  Jim Mezon's talents are totally wasted in the caricatured figures of the insensitive Dr. Kelekian and Bearing's uninterested father.  Alex Poch-Goldin succeeds in the difficult task of making the unbelievable callousness of Jason Posner, the fellow treating Bearing, seem like unchecked enthusiasm rather than a generic example of male insensitivity as it is written.  Kristen Williamson, as the unintellectual nurse who befriends Bearing, makes her character completely natural and believable.  But the most positive impression among the secondary characters is made by Joy Coghill as Bearing's former professor.  Her climbing into bed with the suffering Bearing and reading the children's book "The Runaway Bunny" to her former pupil is the most touching moment in the play.  Marjorie Chan, Kevin Loring, Geneviève Steele and Todd Thomson round out the cast as students and lab technicians, though if Edson had not so contrived Bearing's loneliness, they could have also been put to use as additional visitors.

Pam Johnson has designed appropriate medical garb and a suitably stark, antiseptic set that looks so brand-new and squeaky clean it is unlike any hospital you're likely to visit in Toronto.  The set, like Kevin Lamotte's harsh lighting, is supposed to support Edson's clichéd view of a hospital as an alienating environment.  Personally, the dingy, run-down hospitals of the real world strike me as more depressing.

Glynis Leyshon has given the work impeccable pacing, speeding and slowing the action as necessary to get the most out of every scene.  Ultimately, though, the play stands or falls on the performance of the central role.  And Seana McKenna's performance really is the sole reason for seeing this otherwise negligible play.  That "Wit" won the Pulitzer Prize in 1999 along with virtually every other American drama award going, says more about the current drought in serious American drama than it does about the actual merits of the play.  If you want to learn about ovarian cancer, see your doctor.  If you want to learn about John Donne, read his "Holy Sonnets".  If you want to learn about confronting death, see a secular or religious counsellor.  But if you want to watch a morbid and unenlightening (but beautifully acted) spectacle of someone dying before your very eyes, then this play's for you.

©Christopher Hoile

Photo: Seana McKenna as Vivian Bearing. ©2001 Canadian Stage.