Unwitting Redemption in Margaret Edson's Wit:

Winner of the 1999 Pulitzer Prize, Margaret Edson's medical drama Wit has garnered nearly unanimous acclaim. The play's honors include the Drama Desk, Dramatists Guild, New York Drama Critics Circle, Outer Critics Circle, Los Angeles Drama Critics, and Newsday Oppenheimer awards. Reviewers, too, have had high praise for the show. Lancet critic Bertie Bregman lauds Edson for having turned her work experience in a cancer research hospital into "a production of uncommon emotional force" that offers, "along with the chilling awareness of how bondage to pure intellect can desiccate a life.... a more redemptive vision of intelligence coexisting with tenderness and love." While Bregman situates the play's "redemptive vision" in its pairing of mind and heart, American Theatre reviewer Pamela Renner claims that Wit's "redemption ... takes an unexpected form." Renner asserts that in Wit an oncology nurse's willingness to speak the truth to Professor Vivian Bearing, a Donne scholar dying of ovarian cancer, gives the patient-protagonist "the courage to make a crucial decision about her treatment" (35-36). Renner thus situates redemption in honest communication. That critics describe Wit as a play about redemption is readily apparent. The nature of that redemption, however, is difficult for many of them to describe. Journalist Adrienne Martini confesses in American Theatre to having felt put on the spot in a conversation about the subject with the dramatist: According to Edson, there is more to the play than most of the critical response has acknowledged. "The play is about redemption, and I'm surprised no one mentions it," she says, fixing her bright eyes on me. I feel as if I've been asked a question in school and have no idea what the answer should be. Suddenly, it is easy to picture her in a classroom. "Grace" she clarifies, "is the opportunity to experience God in spite of yourself, which is what Dr. Bearing ultimately achieves." As for herself, Edson professes to Christian faith, but declines to elaborate about it. (22) Edson's caginess about Christianity is more than a promotional gimmick. In part, it reflects her appropriate reluctance to dictate Wit's meaning. "It's not my place to tell people what the play's about. If I have to explain it, I haven't done my job," she said in a telephone interview. Also at work, though, is Edson's deep ambivalence about orthodox Christian faith, despite her high regard for Christ, whom she described in the same interview as being in "a club of one." In a conversation with Betty Carter for Books and Culture, she asserted: "If you're completely united with God, you don't need religion" (26). Indeed, Wit's final scene depicts a redemptive moment devoid of any specific religious association. In addition to its ambiguous treatment of religion, the play reveals Edson's related ambivalence about the life of the mind. Wit's protagonist, Vivian Bearing, ultimately eschews the poetry of her research subject, John Donne, for a children's book titled The Runaway Bunny. That choice mirrors Edson's own decision to abandon graduate studies to teach kindergarten. After studying Renaissance history at Smith College, she worked as a clerk for a hospital cancer and AIDS unit before writing Wit in 1991. While pursuing a master's degree in literature at Georgetown University in 1992, she began teaching English as a second language in the Washington, D.C., public schools. In 1998 she moved to Atlanta, where she teaches five-year-olds. Few kindergarten teachers are likely to write about the intricacies and implications of Donne scholarship, but Wit reflects its author's unusual personal struggle to come to terms with both academia and orthodoxy. In the play Donne serves to symbolize both the intellectual life and Christian faith. The play's apparent rejection of Donne has prompted First Things reviewer Carol Iannone to accuse the playwright of being both anti-intellectual and anti-religious. …