By Lois Sherlow
Special to the Western Star
For the final show of the Provincial Drama Festival St. John’s Players presented Margaret Edson’s 1995 Pulitzer prize-winning play “Wit,” a richly humorous and touching account of the transformation of a rigorous literary scholar as she journeys through the indignities of aggressive treatment for stage 4 metastatic ovarian cancer.
This is as moving a production as one could wish for, a tribute in effect.to anyone who has suffered from cancer or been involved with it in any way.
Vivian Bearing, PhD, tough poetry prof that she is, asks to the audience to be alert for irony in the play. The greatest irony is that such an independent, unsentimental woman in the end elicits such compassion from the audience. As played by Fiona Andersen, she evolves before our eyes from a clever intellectual, defending herself, like her beloved poet John Donne, with wit and word play, to a suffering human being open to the care of her kindly nurse Susie (Katheryn Burke) and to the simplicity she formerly despised.
It is hard for Vivian to become the patient, and worse, the subject of a clinical trial. Dr. Kelekian (played with authority by Janet O’Reilly) is not unkind but businesslike. Her young research fellow, Dr. Jason Posner (James LeBlanc) once took a course in bedside manners and found it a bit of waste of time. Still, Vivian can appreciate his passion for cancer, which equates to her own passion for language. In fact, Jason once took a course from her because she was tough (“no cupcake” he says). Jason is at his comical best in an early scene when he fumblingly examines his old professor, now not the researcher but the researched.
As Vivian undergoes one test after another, she sheds her armoured former self, the senior scholar. Just before her death a visitor, maybe hallucinated, comes to her room, her old mentor E.M. Ashford (warmly played by Morris Hodder). He has brought “The Runaway Bunny,” a present for his great-grandson, and he reads it to Vivian just as one would to a child.
Finally, after a horrible rush to resuscitate against her wishes (she is after all “research”) Vivian is seen making her escape from life to the soft sound of Barber’s Adagio for Strings.
But the most moving moment of the evening came as Fiona Andersen returned to the stage to urge women to be alert to early possible signs of ovarian cancer and to pay tribute to her own sister. A play not only beautifully performed but one that spoke urgently beyond the script to the audience.