Wit at the Hypocrites

Or: Second Childishness

For a woman hosting stage four ovarian cancer Dr. Vivian Bearing (Lisa Tejero) is terribly energetic. A preeminent scholar of John Dunn and the center of Margaret Edson’s stunning study wit, Vivian is, as her name draws from, lively. For her final two hours, her last lecture, director Marti Lyons has given her an enormous hospital cubical (designed by Courtney O’Neill, with her signature whimsical solemnity), here to play at being professor, a student, a child and a veteran snarker. But, sadly, the regular indifference of the hospital business, and her winnowing by both the disease and it treatment, are hustling her towards the ultimate step of life; death.

Tejero’s enthusiasm is somewhat at odds with the more reptilian Vivian the script suggests; she is like a great eloquent child dreaming of being a powerful woman. Her delighted coos and “Cheese, Grommet!” gestures amp up the humor of her ready, knowing wit, and her return to a memory of her 5th birthday, both joyous and lonely, is darling to see. The production as a whole feels rather puckish, harvesting every joke in can before the winter. Tejero can also hit the nail on the head, her rapturous dissection of a Dunn program (with projections by Rasean Davonte Johnson), her growing fear as pain takes the fun out of dying, and the subtle decision over a popsicle to put down DNR, Do Not Resuscitate, are straightforward and bitter in their smallness.

She is supported by her better and worser angles: the latter Dr. Jason Pozner (Eduardo Xavier Culey-Carrillo) a cancer reacher to whom Vivian has ceased to be a dreaded professor and instead become the centerpiece of his project and Susie (Adithi Chandrashekar), her regalar nurse. Culey-Carrillo leans into Pozner’s love of his science: the hungry, exhaltent way he speaks of the metaphysics of cancerous cells forgiving his lovable jerkiness (though at the crisis, the revelation of his priorities fails to ring out in all the confusion). Chandrashekar’s Susie has given so much time to creating a bedside manner that it has become habitual for her, slightly touched with the shadow of smarm, but genuine all the same. When she thanks Vivian for passing on the meaning of her favorite word through a cloud of morphine, her tears as the older woman smiles and mumbles, “I’m a teacher.” is wrenching enough for all of us.

At the end of the day, despite its grand poetry, Wit is about indignity. Of our bodies, our deaths, of work undone and life unlived. In the last instant of the play, Lyons closes the curtains of the cubical severing us from our storyteller, philosopher, and friend as she becomes a prop in what might as well be the fourth act trauma of primetime hospital drama. Mere oblivion. And then, for a half second more, a glimpse of something golden and strange, perhaps the salvation Dunn is always after, perhaps a comfort for children lost in the sharp-edged world that calls us all home.