A review by slichto3
Wit: A Play by Margaret Edson

4.0

This play is really quite wonderful, but it is also jarringly sad in a realistic, hits-close-to-home way. Wit is about Vivian, a woman diagnosed with stage four ovarian cancer. Vivian is also an exacting scholar of the poet John Donne, a loner, and devastatingly human. In the play, Vivian walks us through her life before she dies of the disease. How she's treated by the doctors and nurses, her reflections on her life before her illness and during her treatment, and the relevancy of her studies on Donne. It's really all very fascinating, while also being painfully tragic. I just couldn't help feeling that we are all going the way of Vivian (and that's if we're lucky). The thought of the loneliness and pain and fear of death enveloped me when I was reading this book. Overall, it was a painful experience, but very worth confronting.