Cynthia Nixon on Broadway as Vivian Bearing in Margaret Edson's Wit
Cynthia Nixon, playing the lead in the Broadway revival of
Margaret Edson’s play, Wit, does a
heroic job putting her own mark against Kathleen Chalfant’s signature
performance as the dying Vivian Bearing, the professor and scholar who meets
the only fight she can’t win in her struggle with ovarian cancer.
In fact, by the time her cancer is diagnosed, Prof. Bearing is as
good as dead. At stage four, the cancer
is already metastasizing and her treatment will mostly benefit science rather
than herself. But in perhaps her one selfless
choice, according to a script that finds its heroine mostly distasteful, Vivian
signs up to undergo a rigorous eight-month treatment that doesn’t save her
body, but in most ways saves her soul.
Bearing is hardly a sympathetic character. By acquiescing
to be the subject of research instead of a researcher herself, she learns that there’s
more to life than finding new knowledge. The long hospital stay that ends her
life is her last lesson in how to have the relationships that she regularly denied
herself, devoting her time to the obscure and difficult sonnets of John Donne
instead.
Edson’s play, which won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, wants to have it both ways. It indicts a medical
establishment that sacrifices the humanity of its patients to its quest for
their cure, but at same time indicts its patient, who’s devoted her own life to a similar kind of exacting and dehumanizing (at least in Edson’s version)
research.
Chalfant played this sacrificial character with a dignity and
nuance that made her a truly tragic figure.
Vivian learns too late in her life that she can relate to people instead
of just teaching them, and that human feelings are more ennobled by living them
than by engaging them on the page.
Publicity material of Kathleen Chalfant in the 1998 Off-Broadway production
Through direct address to the audience from her hospital bed,
Vivian lays out the story of her life and her sudden illness, describing how
her father rewarded her zeal for reading, and how her own intellectually
significant female professor inspired her to ever better research and
writing. Her tone is mordant and a bit
self-deprecating, as though she’s embarrassed to think back on her trajectory
from its sorry end.
In the right hands, Vivian can be an engaging and self-aware
narrator of her life’s excesses and can suggest that hers are just a different
variation on those we all suffer. But as
directed for laughs by Lynne Meadow, Nixon’s Vivian is a bit strident, her humor too forced and ironic, until the
morphine finally
calms her down toward the play’s end. She finds her humanity just as the medical
establishment reaches the epitome of its objectification of her body. But Vivian is such an unlikable character
until then that it’s hard to see her story as anything but a joke at the
expense of a smart woman who’s happily chosen to devote her life to her work,
however esoteric.
Prof. Bearing's work is played as too much of a joke in this production
Nixon is a smart performer, and emotionally enough in
tune with the role that she does strike nice chords of sympathy with Prof. Bearing. And clearly the cancer narrative appeals to
her. At a moment when so many women (including
Nixon, who’s a survivor) are diagnosed with breast, ovarian, and other cancers,
a play that addresses their situation with the frankness of Wit is very welcome on Broadway.
It’s just too bad that Edson asks us to think only about how
little agency women have in their own medical care. That, perhaps, marks her play's age—witness the
recent uproar over the lack of women testifying before Congress about their
proposed legislation on women’s reproductive health, which might indicate how fed up women have become with just the kind of objectification and powerlessness that Edson’s
play indicts. But a play that
also allows audiences to laugh at the righteous pursuit of a life of the mind
that Vivian Bearing’s career represents compromises its otherwise feminist intent.
In this Broadway revival, Suzanne Bertish brings terrific verve to
her role as Vivian’s inspiring professor.
She relishes the knowledge she imparts to her pupil, and then demonstrates
utmost compassion when she finds Vivian again at the end of her life. When she crawls into Vivian’s hospital bed to
read to her former star student, the moment is wrenching, not just because all
she has at hand to read aloud is a children’s book she recently shared with her
grandson, but because she loves and respects Vivian for who she is.
The professor's compassion at the end bears no moral judgment,
which is so palpable in the rest of the play. She brings only a clear love and felt presence
that finally
ushers
Vivian out of her life and into a kind of peace.
This production ends as the original did, with Vivian’s
resurrection of sorts after the death that finally, supposedly, frees her from
physical and spiritual pain. Downstage
right, Nixon unfolds from an embryonic ball of limbs and flesh into a
triumphal, extended human “V,” naked and, I suppose, liberated.
The moment is a bit too stark for my taste and too symbolic of the
empty freedom that Vivian’s release into what Donne called the “pause” that is
death brings. She holds her arms above
her head in a peculiar, Pyrrhic victory. But her naked body seems also to signal how
she sacrificed her physical desire for her intellectual ambitions. It’s the wrong kind of triumph to celebrate,
and leaves the play rather hollow at the end.
Nonetheless, it’s good to see Nixon claiming Broadway real estate
to perform a serious play written by a woman.
Edson never wrote another play after Wit,
and still insists she has no intention of returning to the form. She continues to teach at an elementary
school in Atlanta; Wit was the one
dramatic story she wanted to tell.
Given new oncology protocols, the play feels dated, though its
critique of medicine’s essential inhumanity remains sadly relevant. Its portrait of a female professor
as brittle and emotionally stunted still smarts.
When do we get to see a story about a smart, talented woman
intellectual who’s not punished by a fatal disease? These stories have been tiresome since Wit was first produced in New York in
the ‘90s.
I’m always glad when work by and
starring talented women is visible in public forums, but how I wish we
could hear stories that celebrate instead of implicitly denigrate their
accomplishments, and that let them thrive instead of fade.
The Feminist Spectator
Wit, on Broadway through March 17th.