SOURCE: Torrens, James S. “Triple Play.” America 180, no. 18 (22 May 1999): 27-8.

In the following excerpt, Torrens asserts that Edson has placed John Donne's work within a proper context in her play.

And Now for the sleeper of the year, the Pulitzer Prize winner, Wit (the playbill reads “W;t”), by Margaret Edson. Once due for an early closing, the play now seems likely to go on as long as Kathleen Chalfant, in the lead, can endure wearing her head shaven. She is Vivian Bearing, Ph.D., a demanding and acerbic professor of English, who has poured her whole life into explicating the Holy Sonnets of John Donne. Edson, a kindergarten teacher in Atlanta, knew almost nothing about John Donne and his sonnets when she began writing this play 10 years ago, yet her instinct was sound. The evidence of “salvation anxiety” and the planned ambiguity of so many of Donne's...