SOURCE: Wheeler, Edward T. “Continuing the Conservation.” Commonweal 126, no. 7 (9 April 1999): 35.

In the following review, Wheeler praises the emotional impact of Wit, but believes that the play's conclusions inaccurately reflect Donne's religious intent due to the work's focus on the physical and secular.

Celia Wren, writing in the January 29 Commonweal, gives a justly favorable review to Wit, a widely praised play about the struggles of a terminally ill cancer patient. Wren especially notes the honesty of the play's language: “Juggling ideas about knowledge and authority, the rift between the sciences and humanities, the power of words, and other weighty matters, [Wit] often resembles a poem by [John] Donne. As in Donne, the emotion is in the thought.”

The play's protagonist, Vivian Bearing, is a professor of English literature and a Donne scholar. Donne's poetry is used as a weapon in her struggle with doctors and with death. The powerful...