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| Southern CA May 26, 2004
Wit
Reviewed By Shirle Gottlieb
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"Wit"
Theater: 2nd Stage
Location: 2433 Moreton St., Torrance.
Phone: (310) 326-2287.
Starts: May 21, 2004
Ends: June 26, 2004
Evenings: Fri.-Sat. 8 p.m., Sun. 2 p.m.
Price: $12
Presented by: PV Players
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There are certain dramatic roles that are so demanding, so intense, so intellectually challenging and emotionally charged that they require consummately experienced actors to put them across. Emerging talents are seldom (if ever) able to plumb the depth of complex characters such as Hamlet, Hedda, Cyrano, Blanche, or Nora. Nor do we expect them to. Now, along comes Susie McCarthy to correct that conception. Cast here as Vivian Bearing in Margaret Edson's staggering, Pulitzer Prize–winning drama, McCarthy's performance is, in a word, "electrifying."
From the minute Buddy Tobie's cold, penetrating light design hits the bare feet of the bald cancer patient hooked up to the intravenous machine, McCarthy commands both the stage and the audience. Viewers who have previously seen Wit know that the playwright tackles the difficult subject of death without flinching. Bearing, a university professor and distinguished scholar, specializes in 16th century English poetry, especially the enigmatic sonnets of John Donne. An uncompromising heroine full of stubborn determination, strict discipline, fierce integrity, and intellectual curiosity, she has just been told that she's in stage four of "pernicious, metastasized ovarian cancer." There is no stage five. That Edson knows the territory of Wit is undeniable. Both the University Hospital (where Bearing is bombarded with eight continuous cycles of chemotherapy) and the college classroom (where she lectures and recites Donne's puzzling poetry) are authentic.
It's also obvious that director Margaret Schugt embraced Edson's script with all the heart, mind, and soul that she possessed. The success of Wit depends on McCarthy's ability to touch our hearts and excite our minds simultaneously, which she certainly does in her tour-de-force performance. For 105 minutes (there is no intermission) the audience sits traumatized as the scholar's physical state declines while her inner strength remains strong. There's a lot of irony in Edson's writing, in Donne's poetry, and in Bearing's life being held in the hands of a former student. John Strickland is quite convincing as a brilliant young scientist who approaches cancer research with the same detached intensity as Bearing's study of Donne, and John Mann is appropriately clinical as the chief of staff who views his patients as mere medical experiments. In distinct contrast to these two, Heather Ryon plays a compassionate nurse who tries her best to comfort and palliate her dying charge.
Bearing's former mentor, Professor Ashford (beautifully portrayed by Diana Mann), holds the answer. In a pivotal flashback, Bearing recalls the painful moment when Ashford criticized her analysis of Donne's difficult "Holy Sonnets"--the most exhaustive study of death in the English language. Though Ashford was a strict disciplinarian, she understood full well that life must engage the heart and soul as well as the intellect. "The moment between life and death should come as softly as a sigh, a comma, a gentle pause," says Ashford. The play's ending is transformational, and this intimate production is a knockout.
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