By Ed Siegel, Globe Staff, 02/03/2000

RELATED COVERAGE Boston Globe interview with Judith Light Boston Globe preview of "Wit"

Margaret Edson has won so much acclaim for "Wit" one might think she had found a cure for cancer rather than written a very good play about it. Unfortunately, as "Wit" makes clear from the beginning, there will be no miracle cure for Dr. Vivian Bearing and her advanced form of ovarian cancer. "I've got less than two hours," she says, referring to the play's duration.

"Then: Curtain."

It's one of many witty conceits that Edson, the Kurt Warner of play-writing, mines in "Wit." As Warner went from stocking supermarket shelves to winning the Super Bowl, Edson has gone from kindergarten teacher to winning the Pulitzer Prize. Although Edson has returned to her day job, "Wit" continues its triumphant tour of American theaters, the latest stop being in Boston, where it opened last night in a first-rate production.

To say that "Wit" is about cancer is misleading; it is really about finding a balance between head and heart. If that sounds like the kind of emotional fuzziness that a kindergarten teacher might come up with, "Wit" is most remarkable for its intellectual rigor in making an analysis of the "Holy Sonnets of John Donne" the play's centerpiece. Bearing is an English professor specializing in Donne's poetry, and the difference between a comma and a semicolon is all the difference in the world. It becomes a matter of life and death.

After taking over for Kathleen Chalfant in the New York production, Judith Light of "Who's the Boss" fame has taken Vivian Bearing on the road, but this is no case of a talented stage actor giving way to a TV star merely because of her box office potential. Light's performance conveys an empathy for her character with a profound physicality that won't soon be forgotten. Crumpling from self-assured ironist to a pleading bag of bones with only a red cap and a pair of hospital johnnies to hide the abasement from her cancer, Light loses an overly declamatory delivery and finds the warmth within her character's coldness.

This may sound like one of those TV movies in which Light has spent too much of her career, but Edson's conceit of using Donne's poetry rescues "Wit" from the maudlin. Donne's poetry makes Shakespeare seem like a Hallmark greeting card, says one character. The layers within a poem mandate an almost surgical approach, and Bearing certainly has all the intellect one could bring to bear in explicating each poem. But that's not all there is to the Donne deal. His "Holy Sonnets" had all the passion of a lover. In flashback, Bearing is told by her professor that the only way she'll fully understand the punctuation of a Donne poem is to go out on the town with friends (she doesn't have any) rather than head back to the library. This simple idea wafts over her head and she goes on to live a life of intellectual isolation, even attacking Donne for his emotional outburst: "O God, Oh!"

The wittiness Bearing dispenses in dealing with inferior minds will come back to haunt her when the doctors, one in particular, treat her as a book to be read rather than a sentient being undergoing excruciating loss. In her own way, though, Edson can be accused of the same disjunction of head and heart. She uses the medical profession to foster a brilliant parallel between how Bearing conducted herself and her current condition. Bearing is the victim of her own intellectual processes because her doctor, who rather unbelievably took her course, is no more able to see the "O God, Oh!" in the outburst of his patient than she could allow it in Donne's poetry.

But in creating this parallel Edson has created a stick figure herself; the doctor is too unfeeling to ring true. Fortunately, Daniel Sarnelli is such a good actor that he finds, through a nervous gesture or a perfectly-timed pause, a bit of the humanity in Dr. Jason Posner that Edson denied him. Shakespeare & Company staged "Wit" a couple of seasons ago and though Frances West, who was herself dying of cancer, as Bearing and Tina Packer as her professor were spectacular, this is a better production; its director, Derek Anson Jones, who recently died of AIDS, reined in those stick-figure tendencies in the script.

The supporting cast, both onstage and behind it, keep all the fluids flowing. Special kudos goes to Lisa Tharps's performance as the nurse, David Van Tieghem's music and sound design, which capture the sounds of a hospital all too well, and Michael Chybowski's lighting design, which keeps all his American Repertory Theatre productions, including the current "Loot," in the glow. Here he shines the brightest light where it belongs. Who's the boss of this production? Judith Light. She's the boss.

This story ran on page C01 of the Boston Globe on 02/03/2000.
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