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Theatricks Presents
The New Orleans Premiere of
the Pulitzer Prize-winning drama
W;t
by Margaret Edson
Directed by Bert Pigg
starring
Adriana Bate as Vivian Bearing
Vatican Lokey as Dr. Jason Posner
Amy Alvarez as Sue Monahan, RN
Rex Badeaux as Dr. Harvey Kelekian
Charlotte Schully as Dr. Evelyn M. Ashford
with
Abby Lake, Leslie Limberg, Mandi Turner,
Corey Cantrell, and Travis Resor
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Wit
printed Friday, 21 June, 2002
Times-Picayune
by David Cuthbert, Theatre reviewer
Margaret Edson's
Pulitzer Prize-winning play "Wit" deserves better than the very small audience
that greeted it opening night at Southern Rep. It's a beautifully written,
carefully crafted play in which Vivian Bearing, a brilliant, emotionally
barren academic, discovers that her intellect is no match for terminal
ovarian cancer.
As part of a punishing, experimental
chemotherapy program, she encounters a former student -- now a medical
clinician -- who is a mirror image of herself, sublimating his own humanity
in pursuit of knowledge. Just as Bearing's specialty, the 17th century
poetry of John Donne (Death Be Not Proud), has no "solution" to
the questions of life and death that it ponders so exquisitely, cancer
is endlessly fascinating to this young doctor because he relishes not the
possibility of a cure, but its deadly complexity and perfection.
As the tart, sarcastic Bearing,
Adriana
Bate gives a performance of intelligence, bitter humor and great feeling.
She stumbles a bit with the heavy line load and has problems with audibility
at times, but projects the facile, facetious anti-charm Bearing has used
to keep personal relationships at bay all her life.
Vatican Lokey is just what
the doctor ordered as the smug, reptilian physician, and Charlotte Schully,
as Bearing's teacher, is all strength in her first scene and all compassion
in her last, a woman who has found
balance in life. Amy Alvarez's
sweet, dim nurse embodies the power of a caring touch and a good heart.
The cast is competently completed by Rex Badeaux, Travis Resor,
Corey
Cantrell, Leslie Limberg and Mandi Turner.
The hospital-curtain set design
by
Troy McVey works well, as does the effective lighting by Hugh
Lester.
Bert Pigg's unobtrusive direction is focused and fluid.
"Wit," with its unflinching medical
scenes and prickly heroine, is often a tough play to take. But there isn't
much amiss in this "Wit" that an audience wouldn't cure.
Wit
printed by Gambit Magazine
June 23rd, 2002
by Dalt Wonk, Theatre reviewer
When
the house lights came up, after we had given the cast their well-deserved
standing ovation, I walked over to a group of friends in the audience to
say hello. It was only after we had been talking a few minutes that I noticed
we were all whispering ... in unconscious respect for the empty hospital
bed where Vivian had died only a few moments before.
Vivian Bearing, professor of 17th
century English poetry, specializing in the Holy Sonnets of John Donne,
is the protagonist of Margaret Edson's Pulitzer Prize-winning play
Wit.
She is an extraordinary individual -- currently being brought vividly to
life at Southern Rep in Adriana Bate's flawless and haunting performance.
Wit draws its power from a strict
economy that recalls classical drama. The heroine, in fact, first approaches
us in a robe and bare feet -- albeit wearing a baseball cap to hide her
balding head and pulling a mobile I.V. stand with her. It's an image that
makes the heart sink, calling up, as it does, friends and family we have
lost as well as the dreary path we ourselves will most likely have to follow.
Also, frankly, we are reminded of a hundred emergency rooms that have flashed
at us from the TV screen. In short, we are prepared to resist.
Almost immediately, however, Vivian
has us intrigued, amused and involved. First of all, she's a wry, eccentric
little creature. Then, there is her exotic vocation.
In one flashback scene, Vivian's
mentor, professor Ashford (the always-compelling Charlotte Schully),
launches into an impassioned attack on one modern edition of Donne's sonnets
that mistakenly substitutes a semi-colon for a comma. Donne was "sacrificed
to hysterical punctuation," as Ashford puts it. The diatribe is amusing.
It seems the academics who are drawn to Donne share his taste for wit.
But we also get a glimpse of a narrow, competitive world, analogous to
the world of chess, where highly intelligent individuals strive ruthlessly
against one another to win arcane battles.
A defining moment is tossed in,
as it were, at the end of this scene, when the youthful Vivian declares
she'll go right back to the library and get to work. Her mentor tells her
instead to take some time off, have fun with her friends. But Vivian has
no friends. She has no where else to go but the library. For the human
warmth that is missing in her life, she will substitute an expertise in
metaphysical poetry. "I always thought that being extremely smart would
take care of it all," she says later, when the nearness of death and the
brutality of her treatment has changed her perspective.
This scene also illustrates what
I mean by the classicism of the piece. The short conference with her professor
is nearly all we see of Vivian's life before her disease. The play stays
radically focused on its essential story. We get to know Vivian deeply,
but only by accompanying her on the one critical episode in her life that
interests the playwright.
This episode -- her dying -- takes
place in a force field of two opposing principles. The principles are incarnated
by Jason (Vatican Lokey), a brash, ambitious young research doctor,
who uses patients as a "means," and Susie (Amy Alvarez), a simple,
decent, good-hearted nurse who responds to them as an "end." Both of these
characters are brought to life with a convincing naturalness and an understated
verve.
Much of the moment-by-moment enjoyment
of the play comes from our privileged relationship with Vivian, who tells
us her story with her characteristic wit and irony. Her repartee never
has the tinny sound of one-liners. Sometimes she's arch, but sometimes
she's just funny.
For instance, at their first meeting,
Jason tells her he took her course -- because, with typical arrogance,
he decided to take the three hardest courses on campus and get an A in
each. "Did you?" she asks. "An A-minus," he confesses, putting on his rubber
gloves to examine the tumor in her ovaries. There is a silence, when the
humiliating ordeal is over and he has swept out of the room. Then she turns
to the audience. "I wish I had given him an A," she says, ruefully.
A heartfelt thanks to director Bert
Pigg for this well-crafted show. Kudos to Rex Badeaux for solid
performances as the chief researcher, to Troy McVey for the excellent
set and to Hugh Lester for the effective lighting.
This is not an easy play. But in
a city where "easy" is a way of life, it's great to have a such a satisfying
and memorable bit of "difficult" to savor. Don't miss it.
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