Tucked away behind a small stretch of garden at 609 East Market St, Live Arts' Mainstage theatre currently houses the Virginia premiere of "W;t," Margaret Edson's Pulitzer Prize-winning drama. While the play itself does not take an intermission during its 90-minute performance, there doubtless was nary an audience member who did not wish to pause in a minute's thought after the ensemble took its last bow.
Currently a teacher and formerly a clerk in an oncology and AIDS ward, Edson fuses these two influential life experiences to create the central character of her play. Vivian Bearing (played by Linda Zuby), is a brilliant English professor who deals only with the most brilliant of works in her studies, namely John Donne's "Holy Sonnets." In the prime of her career, Vivian discovers that she has fourth-stage ovarian cancer.
Edson, in a televised interview with Jim Lehrer, discusses how her behind-the-desk job has enabled her to observe the multi-dimensional relations between patients and their healthcare attendants. She comes into contact with the mental and emotional complexity involved in grappling to save another's life as a profession or in struggling against ominous forces to keep one's own.
In order to keep her art close to life, Edson strongly urges productions to bring an oncology nurse onto the set. As a compliment to her attempts at art's imitation of life, the Wit Educational Initiative organizes performances of "W;t" at teaching hospitals. From this work of dramatic art, medical interns can observe and learn about patient care issues in all their complexities.
The act of learning not only is a product of this play, it is its central idea. The lesson that Vivian struggles to grasp as her condition worsens is one that she was introduced to as an undergraduate. In a flashback scene, her English professor explains to her that an ill-punctuated edition of Holy Sonnet 6, full of semi-colons and exclamation points, caused her to overlook the poem's simple yet profound meaning. "And death shall be no more, comma, Death thou shalt die," she reads to Vivian. "It is very simple ... With the original punctuation restored, death is no longer something to act out on a stage ... It's a comma, a pause ... one learns something from this poem, wouldn't you say? Life, death. Soul, God. Past, present. Not insuperable barriers ... just a comma."
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When her professor advises her to go out with her friends rather than returning to the library to rewrite the paper, Vivian does not see that "the paper's not the point." She has failed to learn that a life lived with too much near-sighted observation of minor elements can cause one to miss the greater, simple beauty of living, a beauty easily found if one can pause long enough from the steady traffic-flow of life to see it.
During her first round of treatment, Vivian talks through the chemotherapy in order to give the audience a complete history of her academic career. Through the course of her treatment, Vivian, while never losing her sense of humor and leaving the audience with such memorable moments as jumping up on her bed during grand rounds, reaches a humbling conclusion. Edson's eloquent words are as impressive as Zuby's subtle range of expression: "Now is not the time for verbal swordplay, for unlikely flights of imagination and wildly shifting perspectives, for metaphysical conceit, for wit. And nothing would be worse than a detailed scholarly analysis ... Interpretation. Complication. Now is the time for simplicity." This was a lesson Vivian only comprehended after eight months in a hospital room, confronted with a disease that moves faster than time, idling the hours in isolation with her thoughts.
The audience only can assume that Edson hopes that many aside from medical students will learn from the refreshing poignancy and sharp humor of her work. Live Arts surely shares this hope, as the actors in this talented ensemble leave a captivated audience with the thought that a life consumed by minutia is a life that should be subject to self-scrutiny and re-evaluation.
A standout characteristic of the play, delivered skillfully by Zuby's ability to cultivate a close connection with every audience member, is the complex layering of metafiction, which, like the contents of the Donne poems Vivian has studied, is complicated enough to tie your brain in knots before you can unravel the puzzle.
Vivian refers to her play, analyzes her role, and reflects on her lines repeatedly, revealing an amusing self-awareness of her place in the play. She is aware of her actions as an actress, but not the inner workings of the life she acts out. Perhaps Edson hopes that we will become aware of the possibility that life can be seen as its own play, one full of timely pauses and interruptions mid-sentence, one in which we can find enough time away from a complicated day to pause and sit down to a simple evening of excellent acting, innovative comedy, and the bittersweet lesson we can learn from the trial of another.
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