SOURCE: Wren, Celia. “Attitude.” Commonweal 126, no. 2 (29 January 1999): 23-4.

In the following excerpt, Wren notes the clever parallels between the institutions of academia and medicine that Edson draws in Wit.

Dual vision can be uncomfortable, even agonizing, as it is in [a] strikingly literary play that has taken New York by storm. The gorgeously intellectual Wit, elementary-school teacher Margaret Edson's remarkable first play, centers around a brilliant professor of English literature who is hospitalized with advanced ovarian cancer. As research-oriented oncologists swoop down to study her, Vivian Bearing, Ph.D. (played with well-calibrated shrewdness and occasional vulnerability by Kathleen Chalfant, a red baseball cap on her bald head), reflects on her own field of study, the poetry of John Donne. With humor, irony, and a certain exhilaration, the play draws out contrasts and parallels between two kinds of knowledge—medical and literary—and two ways of approaching life—via...