Wit: A Play

Margaret Edson's play examines what makes life worth living through exploration of mortality and human relationships. The work won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, the Drama Desk Award, the Outer Critics Circle Award, the Lucille Lortel Award, and the Oppenheimer Award. It was adapted into an Emmy Award-winning television movie directed by Mike Nichols and starring Emma Thompson. The play explores timeless questions: How should we live knowing we will die? Is how we live and interact with others more important than material, professional, or intellectual achievement? How does language figure into our lives? Can science and art help us conquer death or fear of it? What will seem most important about life as that life comes to an end? Vivian Bearing, a renowned English professor who has spent years studying the Holy Sonnets of seventeenth-century poet John Donne, is diagnosed with advanced ovarian cancer. Confident in her ability to control events, she approaches her illness with the same rational and methodical approach that has guided her academic career. As her disease and its painful treatment progress, she questions the values that have always directed her, coming to understand what truly makes life worth living.