The Soul of “Wit”
Comments(0) I first saw Cynthia Nixon on Broadway when she was a freshman at Barnard, playing the daughter of Jeremy Irons and Christine Baranski in Tom Stoppard’s play, The Real Thing. There was a lot of buzz about her being the real thing as an actress, but frankly I was underwhelmed and thought she was a little superficial and callow. She’s gone on to an outstanding career, of course, and her riveting performance in the excellent new Manhattan Theatre Company production of Wit is anything but superficial and callow. Shows you what I know.
Nixon plays Vivian Bearing, a fiercely intellectual professor of metaphysical poetry, who undergoes a grueling, experimental treatment for Stage IV ovarian cancer. “Superficial and callow” might be words Professor Bearing would apply to her students, who find her standards unusually demanding. She is not one to suffer fools, but now, as she suffers from cancer, she tests the limits of her endurance as she once tested her students.
I saw Kathleen Chalfant’s legendary performance Off Broadway in 1999. I saw Emma Thompson’s Emmy-nominated performance in the HBO movie, directed by Mike Nichols. I saw my wife, Sheila Sheffield, triumph in the role in a regional production on Long Island. Vivian is one of those beautifully written characters who allow actresses to rise to the occasion, and Cynthia Nixon surely does. She so thoroughly immerses herself in the role that there is no trace of Miranda, her glamorous character from Sex and the City.
“I am a force!” Vivian declares at one point, but she is dealing with an insidious power beyond her control. As an authority on John Donne, she has explicated his sonnet, “Death Be Not Proud,” but as death closes in, her pride crumbles. At the mercy not only of the disease but the research ambitions of her doctors, she pleads, “Now is the time for kindness,” a quality she hasn’t been known for, and finally she retreats to child-like helplessness.
I should note that the entire cast, under Lynne Meadow’s intelligent and fluent direction, is excellent. Two scenes are particularly moving. In one, Vivian and her sympathetic nurse, played by Carra Patterson, share a popsicle and the reality of her situation. In the other, near the end, Vivian’s mentor, Professor E.M. Ashford, played by Susan Bertish, crawls into Vivian’s bed and reads The Runaway Bunny to her.
Early in the play, Vivian defines “wit” as something which stimulates one’s intellectual capacity. This play, amazingly the only published work of Margaret Edson (who wrote it at the age of 30, won a Pulitzer Prize for it, and currently teaches sixth-grade social studies in Atlanta), has plenty of wit, both in that sense and in its sense of humor. It manages to move both our heads and our hearts. That is an achievement to cherish, and so is this production. Don’t miss it!
