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Name: ______________________________ Medicine & Literature

Date: _______________________________ Period 3, 6 & 7

W;tby Margaret Edson

BACKGROUND

W;T Background

Edson's Path to Wit

Edson's path to playwriting could only be described as circuitous. Born in 1961, the middle of three children, Edson attended the private Sidwell Friends School in Washington, D.C. where she grew up. Her mother, a medical social worker and her father, a newspaper columnist, encouraged her early theatrical leanings: Edson and her girlhood friend, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, of Seinfeld fame, performed plays in their basements and Edson was an active member of the theater program in high school. She discontinued her theater activities at Smith College, where she took part in the Scholars Program, and graduated magna cum laude in 1983 with a degree in Renaissance history.

Unsure about a career, Edson spent a of couple years going where life took her. In Iowa City, where her sister lived, she sold hot-dogs on the street during the day and at night waited tables at a bar frequented by hog farmers. She learned plain chanting and did manual labor in a French Dominican convent in Rome: "It was just something I felt like doing, so I did," Edson comments.

In 1985 she took a job as a clerk on an oncology/AIDS unit at a research hospital in Washington. The unit was doing clinical trials of the drug AZT for AIDS patients and developing new protocols for the treatment of ovarian cancer. In her unobtrusive clerical position, Edson was able to watch the interactions of very sick patients with their caregivers, and to observe how patients coped with their illnesses and the often dehumanizing environment of a bustling hospital.

She left the hospital after a year, but the experience stayed with her. She went on to intern at a philanthropic organization and do fundraising for a mental health agency, where she published her first piece of writing, a training manual on the psychosocial aspects of AIDS, Living with AIDS: Perspectives for Caregivers.

In 1991, just prior to her thirtieth birthday, Edson decided she needed to "get serious" about her life. She intended to go to graduate school in the fall, but before then, there was something she had to do. She needed to write a play about her year at the hospital. She was struck by the low survival rate of women with ovarian cancer and awed by their dignity and bravery in the face of death.

Edson says, "One was a science writer with three children, going through very aggressive treatment for ovarian cancer. I used to bring her a

newspaper every day. Once, when we were in an elevator, I tried to tell her, in my 22-year-old way, that I admired her courage, and she said very calmly, 'I don't have much choice, do I?'"

It took a while for Edson to settle on an occupation for her main character. Edson knew she wanted her to be someone who moved from a position of authority and power to a position of dependency. She considered protagonists in medicine and law, but liked the idea of a highly articulate academic who discovers that her expertise in literary interpretation has little to do with the real-life trauma of cancer, which cannot be addressed through scholarly research or intellectual argument.

Edson had heard from former classmates that John Donne was one of the most difficult poets to read, so he seemed to be a perfect subject for her hard-edged protagonist's research. Not ever having studied Donne, Edson spent countless hours sifting through centuries of criticism and commentary. She even found a model for her character E.M. Ashford in the real-life Oxford University professor, Helen Gardner, whose meticulous work on Donne's Holy Sonnets made her a well-known authority among scholars. "Scholarly quibbles are very meaningful," notes Edson, "A poem with a comma and a poem with a semi-colon are two different poems."

She found that to "anatomize" a poem down to its punctuation was similar in some respects to the way a medical researcher studies the anatomy of a human being. She was aided in her research and writing by a former mentor at Smith College, who not only coached Edson about the metaphysical poets, but was also, at the time, going through treatment for breast cancer.

From there, Edson claims, the play was clear in her mind. "To say it popped into my mind is the most accurate way of describing it. It just came to me." At the time, Edson was working as a sales clerk in a Washington bike shop. When the play was finished, right before her graduate program was to start, she asked her family to read it aloud around her mother's dining room table. Her high school friend, Derek Anson Jones, who would later direct several professional productions of Wit, played the role of Vivian Bearing.

Her family gave her some suggestions, one of which was to trim the play. It was nearly three hours long. After some cutting, Edson began to send the play out to regional theaters in the hope of seeing it produced. She recalls that her file labeled "rejection" grew quite thick, but Edson had written the play she had wanted to write and, in the meantime, had discovered her vocation as a teacher, so the rejection letters had less sting.

Wit on Stage

From Page to Stage

In 1993, having plucked Edson's manuscript from a pile of 1,000 new scripts, the South Coast Repertory Company in Costa Mesa, California gave the play a public reading, after which, in 1995, it was given a full production with even more cuts. It ran for seven weeks, got rave reviews and won numerous drama awards in the Los Angeles area. Then nothing. Edson kept getting the same negative response from producers: cast size too large, too much talk, too sad, too academic, too disease-of-month.

Her high school friend, Derek Anson Jones, who by now was working professionally in the theater, had been carrying the script around in his backpack showing it to producers he met and gaining an ally in the actor Kathleen Chalfant. Finally, in 1997, he convinced the artistic director of the Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven, Connecticut to allow him to direct a production with Chalfant playing Vivian. Audiences loved it.

A year later the production moved to the tiny Manhattan Class Company Theater in the Chelsea district of New York City, where it was a hit. In January 1999 the production, with Anson Jones directing and Chalfant in the lead, moved to the larger off-Broadway Union Square Theatre and became one of the hottest tickets in New York. Unfazed by success, Edson flew up from Atlanta for her openings only if she thought she could spare the days being out of her classroom.

The play swept nearly every drama award given for an off-Broadway play, including the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Play, The Drama Critics' Circle Award for Best Play, two Drama League awards and the Outer Critics' Circle Award for Outstanding Play. Another honor came early in 1999 when Wit was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

Chalfant took the lead in the London production and the play has been produced around the country at regional theatres in Seattle, Ashland (Oregon), Cincinnati, Houston, Atlanta, Sarasota, and is now being produced in many other cities, as well as in translation abroad.

Ovarian Cancer Background

That Edson has given Vivian Bearing a cancer of the ovary is fitting. The ovaries, part of a woman's reproductive system, are her generative organs, ones that give life. Yet Vivian has borne no children, is not much interested in that aspect of a woman's life, and has chosen her mind – her brain – as her most valued organ.

Edson also chose ovarian cancer as Vivian's ailment because the survival statistics were so grim. Susie, the kind-hearted nurse in Wit, tells Vivian: "There just isn't a good treatment for what you have yet, for advanced ovarian." When playwright Edson won her Pulitzer Prize in 1999, she observed with some disappointment that diagnostic procedures and treatment for ovarian cancer had not advanced much in the almost ten years since she had written her play. The American Cancer Society provides this information:

Symptoms of ovarian cancer are often confused with symptoms for other disorders, so the disease is frequently not diagnosed early enough for treatment and full recovery.

There is no reliable screening test for ovarian cancer, as there is for cervical cancer (the Pap smear). Women tend to misinterpret or ignore symptoms until the cancer has advanced.

Epithelial cell tumors (the kind Vivian Bearing has) develop in the cells that cover the surface of the ovaries. They account for about 90% of ovarian cancers. Treatment is removal of all affected reproductive organs and, usually, chemotherapy.

The severity of a cancer is ranked 1 to 4 according to how far from the original site the tumor has spread. Stage 4 cancers have spread (metastasized) to distant organs, and are therefore much more difficult to treat. Only 25% of ovarian cancers in the U.S. are diagnosed at the early stages.

The five-year survival rate for women with ovarian cancers in stages 1 to 4 is 50%. For women diagnosed at the advanced stages, their five-year survival rate drops to 28%.

Ovarian cancer causes more deaths than any other cancer of the female reproductive system.

An estimated 23,000 new cases will be diagnosed in 2000 in the U.S. 14,000 women will die of ovarian cancer in 2000.

For Vivian Bearing's clinical trial of a new chemotherapy regimen, Edson gave the drugs fictional names. Current clinical trials for treatment of ovarian cancers involve the drugs Interleukin-12, Taxol and a new drug, Herceptin. Other chemotherapy drugs attack both cancer and healthy cells, causing devastating side-effects that include lowering the patient's immune

system, thus making her highly susceptible to other infections. Herceptin targets only cancer cells and seems to be less toxic to healthy cells. Clinical trials using Herceptin for treatment of breast cancer began in 1998. Due to favorable outcomes, Herceptin is now being studied in women with ovarian cancer.

John Donne in Brief

Metaphysics is a branch of philosophy investigating principles of reality that transcend those of any particular science.

Cosmology is the study of the Universe in its totality, and by extension, humanity’s place in it.

Ontology is the study of the nature of being, existence, or reality in general and of its basic categories and their relations, with particular emphasis on determining what entities exist or can be said to exist, and how these can be grouped and related within a hierarchy (order of superiority based on similarities and differences).

Basic category is anything that is said to exist, “to be.”Something that has a distinct, separate existence.

John Donne is a “metaphysical poet” whose poetry is noted for its vibrancy of language and inventiveness of metaphor, especially as compared to those of his contemporaries.

Metaphors

1. "As virtuous men pass mildly away, and whisper to their souls to go… so let us melt, and make no noise. "

Here the author uses metaphor of a virtuous man passing away that refers to his long departure, and asks his lover not to be sad, and do not cry.

2. "No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move. "

John Donne uses floods to compare with tears, and tempests to compare with sign. Hyperbole and natural phenomena are used to be compared to this love relationship. He uses this kind of emotional outbreak of laity's reaction to separation, so as to highlight how refined his love is.

3. "Moving of the earth brings harm and fears…though greater far, is innocent."

(the third stanza) The author implies the terrifying earthquakes as physical departure of those laity people. The movement of the spheres implies the spiritual departure of his lover and him.

Death Be Not Proud

by John Donne(1572-1631)

Death be not proud, though some have called theeMighty and dreadfull, for, thou art not soe,For, those, whom thou think'st, thou dost overthrow,Die not, poore Death, nor yet canst thou kill mee;From rest and sleepe, which but thy pictures bee,Much pleasure, then from thee, much more must flow,And soonest our best men with thee doe goe,Rest of their bones, and soules deliverie.Thou art slave to Fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,And dost with poyson, warre, and sicknesse dwell,And poppie, or charmes can make us sleepe as well,

And better then thy stroake; why swell'st thou then?One short sleepe past, we wake eternally,And death shall be no more, Death thou shalt die.

THE FIRST BOOKE OF THE

FAERIE QVEENE. Edmund Spenser’s long poem, a tribute to the glory of

Queen Elizabeth and her virtuesContayning

THE LEGENDE OF THEKNIGHT OF THE RED CROSSE,

OROF HOLINESSE.

LO I the man, whose Muse whilome did maske, As time her taught, in lowly Shepheards weeds, Am now enforst a far vnfitter taske, For trumpets sterne to chaunge mine Oaten reeds, And sing of Knights and Ladies gentle deeds; Whose prayses hauing slept in silence long, Me, all too meane, the sacred Muse areeds To blazon broad emongst her learned throng:Fierce warres and faithfull loues shall moralize my song.

Helpe then, ™ holy Virgin chiefe of nine, Thy weaker Nouice to performe thy will, Lay forth out of thine euerlasting scryne The antique rolles, which there lye hidden still, Of Faerie knights and fairest Tanaquill, Whom that most noble Briton Prince so long Sought through the world, and suffered so much ill,That I must rue his vndeserued wrong:O helpe thou my weake wit, and sharpen my dull tong.

Wit Theme Chart

Wit Heart v. Head

Death Knowledge

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