ARTSMONDAY: Law Prof Brings Wit to Death

Margaret Edson’s “W;t” follows the cancer treatment of the ironically named Dr. Vivian Bearing, a professor of 17th century literature specializing in the Holy Sonnets of John Donne. Dying of ovarian cancer, Bearing (Heather Boas) distances herself from the horrific eight months of futile chemotherapy by analyzing her disease in the context of Donne’s paradoxical attitudes toward death.

Throughout the play, directed by Harvard Law School Professor Bruce L. Hay, Bearing oscillates between narrating her own experience with intellectual detachment and living it with graphic, emotional loss of control; in one scene she may lecture on hospital procedure and in another sob hysterically while vomiting into a plastic basin. Edson has her heroine’s experiences parallel Donne’s, making for a play that, like his poems, is both intellectually complex and emotionally wrenching.

True, transparency projections of poetry might be a thing some students would want to leave behind after a Lit and Arts A lecture, and watching an English professor die of cancer isn’t everyone’s idea of a fun Saturday night. The classroom setting of the production is fitting since—even when Dr. Bearing is not at the lectern—an audience member has the sensation of, if not exactly being lectured at, then of being presented with a particularly tricky puzzle.

This is not to say that the play is an entirely intellectual and depressing experience.

In fact, the exercise in coming to terms with death is leavened by humor—Dr. Bearing seizes all opportunities to display her own capacious wit, even mocking her deathbed scenes (“I never thought my life would be this corny”). The overall tone of the production, however, is grim; the jokes are more of a defense mechanism than the product of a genuinely insouciant attitude toward life.

Boas portrays Bearing’s intensity and anguish, stressing the hostile, hubristic, and threatened side of her personality, a choice that is in keeping with the script but also somewhat alienating for audiences. Her medical counterparts, Dr. Kelekian (John D. Boller) and Dr. Posner (Lenny M. Braman, HLS ’05) are brisk and impersonal. Posner is slightly warmer than Bearing yet less self-aware; unlike Bearing, has no idea that he should be more sympathetic, even as he describes his patient as “very unresponsive” on a clipboard before realizing that said patient is in fact deceased.

Still, the play avoids the trap of caricature; Posner is genuinely excited about cancer and poetry, while Kelekian and Bearing share a moment complaining about the ineptitude of their respective students.

A sympathetic nurse (Kristen Smeltzer) named Susan and a former professor of Dr. Bearing, her sole visitor (Elizabeth K. Mahoney ‘05) inject poignancy into the play with tiny gestures. In fact, Susan rubs the unconscious Bearing’s hands with lotion, while her visitor Dr. Ashford kisses the dead woman on the forehead, performing gestures that with their naturalism avoid seeming emotionally manipulative.

Although the play ultimately endorses Susan and Ashford’s humanistic viewpoint as both a reading of Donne and a way of life, leading to a dramatically powerful ending (though Boas, understandably if disappointingly, elects not to disrobe for her death scene), the overall tone of the drama avoids it.

“W;t” is rich in intellectual exercises, inviting the viewer to pick up a highlighter and compare its structure to that of a sonnet by Donne, but these puzzles are more interesting than the somewhat simplistic questions of philosophy or the realistic but unsympathetic and slightly flat characters. In fact, audience members are more likely to come out of this play inspired to pick up a book of poetry than to be kinder to their fellow man: a result, perhaps, that Vivian Bearing would approve of.