"It's not my intention to give away the plot, but I think I die at the end."
Theatrically speaking, you haven't lived till you've seen this play about dying.
Wit is one riveting playwriting specimen, and UNLV's production not only gives its themes a thorough examination, but fully exploits its dramatic pulse.
Mounted here by Nevada Conservatory Theatre, Wit began off-Broadway, migrated to London's West End, won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize, then morphed into the 2001 Emmy-winning HBO film.
It was the first—and so far, only—play by Margaret Edson, an Atlanta elementary schoolteacher. (UNLV has bulked up its usual schedule for Wit, offering six performances per week.)
Inspired by Edson's experiences working in a research hospital's cancer ward, Wit measures the limitations of intellect and ironic detachment—the tiresome tone of our age for those afraid of authentic emotion—against the invaluable kindness of the human heart. The two confront one another when metastasized, stage-four ovarian cancer—a grapefruit-sized tumor—strikes a brittle, sharped-witted college professor of 17th-century literature, stripping away her lifelong emotional defenses.
Glenn Casale's crisp direction and minimalist approach pay immense dividends: Though a "mainstage" production, Wit is wisely staged not at the expansive Judy Bayley Theatre, but the smaller Black Box, generating a compelling closeness between actors and audience for a story about breaking down barriers to unguarded intimacy.
Props—IV drips, hospital beds, exam tables—are wheeled on and off, while orderlies, nurses and technicians enter and exit from four corner aisles of the spartan stage, lending the production a sense of forward motion crossed with feelings laid bare.
Scenic designer Rebecca LaRaine Lee's tiled, ice-blue backdrop conveys hospital neutrality, and Hannah L. Boigon's lighting—particularly during X-ray exams and a gripping, transformative climax—is effective.
But the funny, gritty, tragic soul of Wit lies in the astounding performance of guest artist Judy Jean Berns.
An Equity actress and regional theater veteran (with TV credits including The West Wing and Carnivale), Berns plays Dr. Vivian Bearing, a 50-year-old scholar of John Donne sonnets who's hospitalized, friendless (beyond one estranged colleague) and fearful. But her vulnerabilities are cloaked beneath a fearless facade of witty, brainy bravado, distancing her from the humiliation of the hospital experience and the specter of death—for awhile.
Ravaged she may be—thin and pale, shuffling along in hospital gown and socks, trailing her IV drip, a Red Sox cap covering her bald, radiation-ravished head—but Vivian remains ferociously engaged, an agile intellectual lion.
Berns dominates and mesmerizes from Moment 1, her Vivian both wry observer and increasingly frightened star in the drama of her own demise.
From curious admissions interviews (Physician: "How is your health?" Vivian: "Well, I have cancer"); to the reliable punch line of "how-are-you-feeling-today?" from distracted doctors; to ceaseless tests robbing her of control of her life; to her violent vomiting and vicious pain as the cancer closes in, Berns takes us on the odyssey of a woman whose infallible coping mechanism finally fails her when she needs it most.
Now she's vulnerable to the ministrations of others. "What we have come to think of as me," she tells us, "is now a specimen jar."
She's also seamless in flashback scenes (you nearly forget she's wearing a hospital gown), lending insight into Vivian's aggressive flexing of intellectual muscle—learning to love words at her father's knee, waxing rhapsodic over Donne's dense meditations on metaphysics and mortality, and grilling students in a classroom.
Through it all, Berns is compulsively watchable in a performance to cherish. And in a warm turn, Zonya Johnson provides narrative counterweight as Susie, the kindly nurse we'd all want by our deathbeds.
Wit also casts a critical eye on medical ethics and impersonal health care, either out of necessity (can doctors remain sane if they open their hearts to every patient?) or genuine indifference.
In one squirmy scene, Vivian is subjected to a pelvic exam by a physician who's also a former student. In another, a team of clipboard-toting research docs debate her condition, talking over and around Vivian's frail body, concerned with keeping a human lab rat alive with massive chemotherapy.
This is tough stuff.
But as this funny, affecting play nears its climax—when this prickly woman with the protective shell softens enough to indulge her heart, coming to appreciate Nurse Susie calling her "sweetheart" and her old colleague discarding Donne's intense poetry in favoring of reading Vivian a children's story in her final moments—a very human journey has been very well-traveled.
|
Sleepless in Las Vegas: Sexual politics—infinitely more intriguing than the sort CNN fusses over—suffuse Las Vegas Little Theatre's Insomniac Project double bill, following Surviving Grace.
The first of the short plays, Phyllis Nagy's Trip's Cinch, is a well-intentioned misfire that examines an alleged rape from three shifting perspectives, apparently to illustrate the ambiguities of sexual pursuit—and the idea that there's no absolute truth to any human encounter.
In Scene 1, a feminist academic interviews a man acquitted of the rape. In Scene 2, the academic interviews the woman who lost the case and her job. Scene 3 cuts to the beachside encounter between accused and accuser, with us left to decide whether the sex was consensual.
Despite good work from actors JayC Stoddard, Kara Cohen and Colleen Lohide, Nagy makes her points so subtly that the play winds up more intellectual exercise than involving drama.
Matters improve with Israel Horovitz's Hopscotch, the tale of a young man and woman, apparently strangers, who come upon each other in a park playground, but their chance encounter hints at more than a surface connection. The seemingly random strands of this setup dovetail into a revelation that unleashes heated words, accusations and bitterness.
In his depiction of a moment in time between a man and a woman and its rippling aftereffects, Horovitz deftly deconstructs two vastly different consequences of the heart.
Erica Stoddard and John A. Lorenz maximize this material, building, then exploiting the tensions between them, culminating in a compelling climax.
Unlike some relationships, it's worth losing a little sleep over.