Sign-In
Cart
Wit: A Play
Paperback
Publisher Price: $15.00
ISBN13: 9780571198771
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: Mar 29 1999
Pages: 85
Weight: 0.24
Height: 0.32 Width: 5.05 Depth: 7.83
Language: English
Awards: Pulitzer Prize
Winner of 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
Margaret Edson's powerfully imagined Pulitzer Prize-winning play examines what makes life worth living through her exploration of one of existence's unifying experiences--mortality--while she also probes the vital importance of human relationships. What we as her audience take away from this remarkable drama is a keener sense that, while death is real and unavoidable, our lives are ours to cherish or throw away--a lesson that can be both uplifting and redemptive. As the playwright herself puts it, The play is not about doctors or even about cancer. It's about kindness, but it shows arrogance. It's about compassion, but it shows insensitivity.
In Wit, Edson delves into timeless questions with no final answers: How should we live our lives knowing that we will die? Is the way we live our lives and interact with others more important than what we achieve materially, professionally, or intellectually? How does language figure into our lives? Can science and art help us conquer death, or our fear of it? What will seem most important to each of us about life as that life comes to an end?
The immediacy of the presentation, and the clarity and elegance of Edson's writing, make this sophisticated, multilayered play accessible to almost any interested reader.
As the play begins, Vivian Bearing, a renowned professor of English who has
spent years studying and teaching the intricate, difficult Holy Sonnets of the
seventeenth-century poet John Donne, is diagnosed with advanced ovarian cancer. Confident of her ability to stay in control of events, she brings to her illness the same intensely rational and painstakingly methodical approach that has guided her stellar academic career. But as her disease and its excruciatingly painful treatment inexorably progress, she begins to question the single-minded values and standards that have always directed her, finally coming to understand the aspects of life that make it truly worth living.
Also in
Plays
KJV, Pew Bible, Large Print, Hardcover, Burgundy, Red Letter Edition (Large Print Edition)
Thomas Nelson
Hardcover
Death of a Salesman: Certain Private Conversations in Two Acts and a Requiem
Miller, Arthur
Paperback
Inherit the Wind: The Powerful Drama of the Greatest Courtroom Clash of the Century
Lawrence, Jerome
Lee, Robert E.
Paperback
When Life Gives You Risk, Make Risk Theatre: Three Tragedies and Six Essays
Dean, Gabriel Jason
McClain, Nicholas Dunn &. Emily
Wong, Edwin
Paperback
The Laramie Project and the Laramie Project: Ten Years Later
Kaufman, Moises
Tectonic Theater Project
Fondakowski, Leigh
Paperback
A Doll's House and Other Plays: With Pillars of the Community, Ghosts and an Enemy of the People
Ibsen, Henrik
Paperback
A Place to Call Home: The Story of How a TV Series Stirred Passions and Connections
Krasnow, Ronni
Divine, Donna Robinson
Paperback
Pledge and Play: How the Passion Play in Oberammergau Changes a Village and Impacts the World
Fritsch, Anne
Paperback
Oedipus Trilogy: New Versions of Sophocles' Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus, and Antigone
Sophocles
Paperback
The Revelation of Jesus Christ!: Seven Years That Changes Our World Forever!
Abbott, Thomas
Paperback