Great Escape Brings ‘Wit’ to Marshall
MARSHALL, Mich.–Though first produced nearly 25 years ago, Wit, Margaret Edson’s Pulitzer Prize winning drama, remains the most powerfully touching and relevant piece of literature written about cancer.
It is for this reason that even a serviceable production such as the one currently being staged at Great Escape Company in Marshall has an impact.
Beautifully poetic, smart, and funny, the deeply moving play premiered in 1995, hit Off Broadway in 1998, and has had multiple revivals on Broadway and the West End in addition to Mike Nichols’ gorgeous 2001 film adaptation starring Emma Thompson. Never sentimental, the story ironically challenges the tired trope of survival and does the work in action of Susan Sontag’s “Illness as Metaphor” to rage against our culture’s insidious need to use the lexicon of war to make cancer a battlefield in which those who die are the inevitable losers.
In fact, the play begins with a cancer diagnosis as well as the boldly blatant spoiler alert from the patient herself that she will not, ultimately, survive. Dr. Vivian Bearing, the celebrated professor of 17th Century literature who specializes in John Donne’s metaphysical poetry and is renown for being a tough and terrifically demanding teacher, has stage IV metastatic ovarian cancer. She is alone—single, no children, no family—with no emergency contact, and though her intellectual brilliance and wit cannot save her life, she willingly undergoes torturous experimental treatment, allowing her body to become a text to the medical team, because above all else she values research and the pursuit of knowledge.
Bearing, ambitiously played by Ellen Bennett, breaks the fourth wall and speaks directly to the audience from her last hours of life in the strange and dehumanizing setting of the research hospital. She undergoes an excruciating pelvic exam from a research fellow who also happens to be a former student of hers; she analyzes the peculiar language of her disease and its treatment as only a literary scholar could; she ponders her own mortality and existential dread through Donne’s Holy Sonnet X (“Death Be Not Proud”); and through a series of flashbacks remembers poignant moments of her life: falling in love with language as a child while being read to by her father; having her writing and interpretation challenged by her undergraduate mentor; and in her most potent element—in command as a lecturer in front of her students.
Bennett, along with the rest of the cast directed by Randy Lake, manages to communicate the the wit and language of the play as well as its plot and deeper themes—that of vulnerability and the touching inevitability of human connection against all odds—despite artistic limitations that prohibit breathing more life into the script than it has on the page.
Costumes by Kim Forde, props by Laurie LeClear, lighting design from Graham Rowe-Bultinck, all lend themselves to clarity in terms of character and narrative; though blocking is at times awkward and the major climactic moment of the play is overblown to the point that its emotional power is entirely dissipated.
Undoubtedly, the production is a labor of love, and an impressive stretch for this company—one that strives to provide an interesting range of live theater to this small but mighty arts-loving community. Great Escape is to be commended for taking on such excellent material, even if it falls short of its greatest promise.