Donne and out

Wit offers an ironic look at cancer at Portland Stage Company

By Robert von Stein Redick

Wit plays through May 5 at the Portland Stage Company. Call (207) 774-0465.

CANCER WARD: just like Solzhenitsyn wrote 50 years ago.

She is, in her own phrase, “a scholar of distinction,” a 50-year-old expert on the metaphysical English poet John Donne. When she appears in the center of a darkened stage, she is even wearing a gown, but not the black sort with the square cap and purple sash, denoting intellectual power. On the contrary, Dr. Vivian Bearing is in hospital white, pale and gaunt as a long-term prisoner, and her spunky orange baseball cap does not quite disguise her baldness.

After stating her academic credentials, she manages to convey, almost in passing, that she suffers stage four metastatic ovarian cancer. Since “there is no stage five,” she has also (with a precision theater provides more easily than medicine) less than two hours to live. Her tone is not one of grief, but of concentrated thought and wry observation. “It is not my intention to give away the plot; but I think I die at the end.”

Thus, in 60 seconds, the shape of Margaret Edson’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning Wit is defined. Vivian will die, and we will see it happen. But from these straightforward beginnings all sorts of surprises erupt. One of these occurs when Jason Posner, the researcher assigned to her case, reveals that he is also her former student. A cold young man whose bedside manner consists of a bellowed “How are you feeling today?” and an irritated two-second hover for the reply, Jason is quick to assert his indifference to poetry: he enrolled because he likes a challenge — and the cerebral paradoxes of John Donne’s Holy Sonnets offer challenges aplenty.

A greater surprise is the fact that Edson’s play, which earned so many top honors it’s indecent to list them, is her first and only. Nor is she hard at work on the next. “If there’s something else I want to say in ten years, then I’ll think about it,” she declared in a PBS interview. Until then she is committed to her kindergarten class in Atlanta.

Envy the children. In Wit, Edson has written a play of rare intelligence, anchored on a fascinating character and her uncompromising outlook on the world. The current production by Portland Stage, which opened Friday, is every bit as unflinching as the script demands, though not as wry.

For Vivivan is lit-crit to her core, and cannot approach any subject — from 17th-century poetry to her own death — without irony. Except for a few brief flashbacks to home and university, Wit’s locale is the cancer ward, but Vivian’s new surroundings can’t stop the old habits of mind. After vomiting horrendously into a basin, she wonders aloud, “What’s left to puke?” An embarrassed pause follows, then: “You may remark that my vocabulary has taken a turn for the Anglo-Saxon.”

Irony is hard to pin down. Sometimes it is the spark that leaps between an expected result and what actually occurs. Sometimes it is the difference between what an audience knows and what is grasped by players onstage. And sometimes it is the head-on crash between a notion and the evidence of its inadequacy. Vivian, in her dual roles as narrator and victim, grimly celebrates all three. When the chemotherapy attacking her tumor also shuts down her immune system, she quips from her quarantine bed: “I am not in isolation because I have cancer . . . No, I am in isolation because I am being treated for cancer. My treatment imperils my health.”

As Bearing, Leslie Denniston holds nothing back. Her restless musings, focused especially on the way the doctors’s cold hunger for knowledge mirrors her own, goads her again and again from her sickbed, even as the strength to do so vanishes. Staggering back and forth in her flimsy gown, sparring with orderlies, clipping and unclipping her IV bottle, she evokes an athelete trapped in a failing body. It is a heartbreaking variation on Milton’s idea that “the mind is it’s own place” — for ultimately Milton is wrong; at death, the mind is the body’s slave.

Denniston does not, however, reveal a great instinct for irony. The fury of a dying scholar is there, but not the consciousness of absurdity, the brilliant but involuntary carping at the silliness of doctors, poets, and even Vivian herself that pulse through Edson’s script. At death’s door, it suggests, the consolations of intellect are slight. Yet the contrast should be anything but: from high-minded sharpshooting, Vivian is reduced to begging for the most prosaic of human kindnesses — baby oil on her hands, a nurse to sit with her at midnight. The transformation loses some of its punch when the protagonist’s own witticisms escape her.

As the researcher Jason Posner, Bryan Taylor is nervous and irritable without communicating any deeper feeling for his motives. We sense his impatience but not where it comes from, and it is the latter that might intrigue. Stronger are William C. Mitchell as the severe chief researcher, and Ryan Dunn as nurse Suzy, the only character not blinkered by intellectual pride. Barbara Mather’s performance as Vivian’s old mentor, Dr. E.M. Ashford, is a standout, especially when old age grants her a kind of sympathy for the dying woman no one else possesses.

Yet all these characters play a decidedly supporting role. Edson’s play belongs to Vivian Bearing, and Denniston’s portrait is generally magnificent, if cramped in one crucial regard. This is not flawless Wit, but it more than holds its own.

Robert von Stein Redick can be reached at robvsredick@earthlink.net.