Wit at American Stage Theatre Company

In her extraordinary first play, Margaret Edson has created a work that is as intellectually challenging as it is emotionally immediate. Vivian Bearing, Ph.D., a brilliant and renowned professor of English, a specialist in the metaphysical, life-and-death themes of John Donne's Holy Sonnets, now finds herself the subject of research designed to try to save her life. Her approach to the study of poetry is aggressively probing and intensely rational, but during the course of her illness and her stint as a prize patient in an experimental chemotherapy program at a major teaching hospital, Vivian comes to reassess her life and her work with a profundity and humor that are transformative both for her and the audience.

Authors

• Margaret Edson

Tony Awards and Nominations for Wit