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Dying words
Trinity’s respectable Wit
BY BILL RODRIGUEZ

Wit
By Margaret Edson. Directed by Peter Sampieri. Set by Christine Jones. Lighting by Russell Champa. Costumes by Marilyn Salvatore. Sound by Peter Hurowitz. With William Damkoehler, Barbara Meek, Anne Scurria, Stephen Thorne, and Sarah Martini. At Trinity Repertory Company through June 30.


Playwright Margaret Edson picked the perfect academic obsession for her dying character in Wit: John Donne, the best and brightest of the 17th-century metaphysical school of poets, but also a cleric who was a little shaky on believing the salvation thing. The widely and wildly — perhaps overly — praised play is quite the satisfying intellectual feast for us, and it’s all carefully laid out in the respectable rendition that’s being staged by Trinity Repertory Company.

Wit’s main course, mortality, is the concern of both Donne and 50-year-old professor Vivian Bearing, who has specialized in him. Until she discovered she had ovarian cancer, however, her interest in Donne had to do not with his desperate fear of the afterlife but rather with such matters as line scansion and punctuation. Bearing has been a fearsome presence on campus, one of the hardest graders and unforgiving to lazy students. Wit charts her journey toward humanity.

The one-act memory play has a too-too-clever Bearing address us straight off, informing us cheerfully that she has only two hours to live. Implied is that her wits and her witty repartee will not be enough. We get to know her through flashbacks to classes she has taught, to a lesson she learned from her philology professor (Barbara Meek) about dispassion in critical studies, to her being inspired by words at age five while reading Beatrix Potter to her father, and so on.

Bearing is one tough cookie, and the doctor (William Damkoehler) who breaks the grim news to her recognizes that and recruits her into an experimental chemotherapy program. And by God, she toughs out all eight months, the only patient ever to endure the horrific full-dose regimen. Her comforter is nurse Susie Monahan, whom Sarah Martini makes amiable and a little smarter than is written. Bearing gets her sole visitor the day she dies. Her only other company is Dr. Jason Posner (Stephen Thorne), a research physician who more than once has to be reminded to toss his patient a cursory " And how are you today? "

Scurria does a fine job portraying the smart and feisty woman who at the ragged end of her life finally balances the yin and yang of heart and intellect. But I didn’t see the woman that Bearing rescued herself from, the imperious professor whose stare could crumple an unprepared student. When Scurria eyeballs a couple of students who are joking within earshot at the expense of Donne and herself, the daggers she shoots are novelty-shop rubber ones. I don’t believe for a minute that the charming woman she — as opposed to Edson — creates would have only a single hospital visitor. We never see Bearing being convincingly mean. The lack of contrast diminished my appreciation of her change, her redemption.

I also wanted a clearer growth arc from Stephen Thorne as the research-blinded Posner. Thorne establishes a boyishness that gets his character off the hook — he’s no cold-hearted creep, just a gleeful carcinoma wonk. There’s one scene that could have shifted Posner’s center of gravity, however. When Bearing convinces him she has taken an interest in his monomania and he describes his admiration for cleverly proliferating cellular life, the two could have had a moment of empathy. That would have helped me believe that this hitherto businesslike physician could panic, as he does at the end.

Freshman director Peter Sampieri — who graduated from Trinity Rep Conservatory during rehearsals — may not have convinced Scurria to be less lovable, but he does pace Wit with appropriate ebb and flow, finger-popping briskness and contrasting slow-down, as needed. At one point he lets Martini massage Scurria’s hands for a good long time when Nurse Monahan knows that Bearing is drugged and quite unconscious.

Christine Jones’s set design couldn’t be simpler. Bearing’s mind is not unlike a university-club drawing room, so we get a wall of tongue-in-groove, like wainscotting — a walnut-stained blank slate upon which she can project her life for us.

The playwright never does call up the famous lines from Donne’s 1623 Devotions that begin, " No man is an island, " and conclude, " therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee. " I suppose Edson was presumptuous enough to feel that her play says the same in other words. Wit, teetering on the knife edge of sentimentality and never stumbling, does just that.

Issue Date: June 6-13, 2002
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