MARGARET EDSON

A stunning first play about an academic attempting to come to terms with cancer.Winner of the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for DramaNow an Emmy-award winning feature film starring Emma ThompsonVivian Bearing, Ph.D., a renowned specialist in the brilliantly difficult Holy Sonnets of John Donne, has been diagnosed with stage four metatastic ovarian cancer. Her approach to her illness is not unlike her approach to Donne: aggressively probing and intensely rational. But during the course of her illness - and her stint as a prize patient in an experimental chemotherapy programme - she comes to reassess her life and her work with profundity and an unbearably moving wry humour.An original and urgent work of art. Among the finest plays of the decade - Wall Street JournalA dazzling and humane play you will remember until your dying day - New York MagazineA brutally human and beautifully layered new play. You will feel both enlightened and, in a strange way, enormously comforted - New York Times

Called "a dazzling and humane play you will remember till your dying day" by John Simon in New York Magazine, Wit is centered on Vivian Bearing, Ph.D., a scholar of seventeenth-century poetry who, as she is dying of ovarian cancer, comes to reassess her life and her work with a passion and humor that are both moving and redemptive.

Vivian Bearing, a specialist in the Sonnets of John Donne, has been diagnosed with terminal ovarian cancer. Her approach to her illness is not unlike her approach to Donne: probing and rational. During the course of her illness, she reassesses her life and work with profundity and wry humour.