Whenever I meet with a Tisch student I am never sure if I
will get a book or a play. This time it
was a play. Margaret Edson’s W:t is a riveting story of a fifty
year-old college professor who is stricken with stage IV ovarian cancer. Vivian Bearing is a renowned John Donne
scholar who over the course of the play, throughout her eight-week trial
chemotherapy treatment, declines quickly.
The clinical fellow at her bedside is a former student who took her
toughest undergraduate course on Donne.
The two exchange their experience with Donne, interspersing couplets of
prose all trying to understand death and the demise of a person. Vivian agrees to the experimental process
knowing that there is limited chance of surviving. This strong-willed woman is
succumbing to the worst that cancer can throw at someone. Vivian’s transformation is all so frightening
true in stage IV victims. Not being a
John Donne scholar, I only could find the surface level of his work to Vivian’s
demise. Hard to imagine the staging of
this play, but the dialogue is absolutely on-point and I could feel the pain
and anguish as Vivian begins to realize her pen is not mightier than the fight
with cancer. Two cancer reads in a week
are about my outer limit of dealing with the disease. The playwright makes her points through the
story.
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