Having missed Kathleen Chalfant in a role that she was apparently born to play—Dr. Vivian Bearing in Margaret Edson’s powerful medical drama, Wit—I can’t weigh her performance against Cynthia Nixon’s in the Manhattan Theatre Club revival. But it is easy to imagine that Chalfant’s patrician starch and throaty low register perfectly conveyed a literature professor who can anatomize verse as easily as she verbally flays her students. Nixon has an innate warmth and coltishness that works against her, and she struggles in the first third of Lynne Meadow’s production to project sufficient froideur and hauteur. Still, it’s a testament to this remarkable play and Nixon’s skill that we ultimately believe her as the cancer-stricken teacher. Believing, we also weep at her fate.
About halfway through the piece, author Edson (a one-hit wonder in the most respectful sense) clues us in on her plan. Bearing, a specialist in John Donne’s 17th-century holy sonnets, is guiding us through one. She summarizes the poem’s schema as “aggressive intellect. Pious melodrama. And a final, fearful point,” and so it is with Wit. We watch as our narrator-protagonist, diagnosed with terminal ovarian cancer, uses her brains to outthink doctors by quibbling with medical terminology or critiquing protocol. As her condition worsens, the play moves into an emotionally gripping mode. And in its final moments (not to give too much away), there’s palpable terror, along with deliverance.
Bearing’s a wonderful role for a woman, a chance for an actor to build up a shiny carapace of eloquent rumination, and systematically dismantle it. Nixon commands her spotlight with a nimble, sensitive portrayal (especially strong as a child and when in final-stage agonies), but there’s also key support from Greg Keller as a brash young oncologist, Carra Patterson as a sympathetic caregiver and the formidable Suzanne Bertish as Bearing’s stern literary mentor. Donne chastised death for being proud, but this company earns its bragging rights.—David Cote
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