Awards
Winner of the 1999 Pulitzer Prize
Synopses & Reviews
In her extraordinary first play, Margaret Edson has created a work that is as intellectually challenging as it is emotionally immediate. Vivian Bearing, Ph.D., a renowned scholar and professor of English who has spent years studying and teaching the brilliant and difficult metaphysical sonnets of John Donne, has been diagnosed with terminal ovarian cancer. Her approach to the study of Donne has been aggresively probing and intensely rational. But during the course of her illness and her stint as a prize patient in an experimental chemotherapy program at a major teaching hospital Vivian comes to reasses her life and her work with a profundity and humor that are transformative both for her and the audience.
Review
"[A] brutally human and beautifully layered new play...you feel both enlightened and, in a strange way, enormously comforted." The New Yotk Times
Review
"A dazzling and humane new play that you will remember till your dying day." New York Magazine
About the Author
Margaret Edson lives in Atlanta, Georgia, where she is an elementary school teacher. Between earning degrees in history and literature, she worked in the cancer and AIDS unit of a research hospital. Wit is her first play.