The release date for the English version of 'Wit' by
Margaret Edson is Mar 1999. If you enjoy this novel, it is available for buy as a paperback from Barnes & Noble or Indigo, as an ebook on the Amazon Kindle store, or as an audiobook on Audible.
Recipient of the Pulitzer Prize, the Drama Desk Award, the Outer Critics Circle Award, the Lucille Lortel Award, the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, and the Oppenheimer Award
Through her investigation of one of existence's unifying experiences—mortality—Margaret Edson explores what makes life worthwhile while also delving into the critical significance of human connections in her vividly envisioned Pulitzer Prize–winning drama.
Her audience has a deeper understanding of the fact that, while death is inevitable and real, our lives are ours to treasure or waste—a message that can be both uplifting and redemptive—from this amazing play. "The play is not about doctors or even about cancer," the author states. Although it's about charity, it displays conceit. Although it's about compassion, it comes out as insensitive.
Edson explores ageless issues in Wit, such as how to spend our life in light of our impending death. Is our style of living and our relationships with others more significant than our intellectual, professional, or monetary accomplishments?
What role does language play in our daily lives? Can we overcome our dread of death and our distrust of science and art? As our life draws to a close, what will each of us value most about it?
Almost any interested reader can understand this smart, multidimensional drama because of its immediate presentation and Edson's elegant, clear language.
At the start of the play, Vivian Bearing, a well-known English professor who has dedicated years of research and instruction to the complex, challenging Holy Sonnets of seventeenth-century poet John Donne, receives a diagnosis of terminal ovarian cancer. She approaches her disease with the same keen rationality and meticulous systematic attitude that have guided her exceptional academic career, confident in her capacity to maintain control over the situation.
But as her illness and its unbearably painful treatment go unabated, she starts to doubt the unwavering principles and beliefs that have guided her whole life and eventually realizes what elements of life are really worth living.