Cynthia Nixon as Vivian Bearing from Wit by Margaret Edson
Overview: In this unit we will explore the paradoxical presence of complexity and simplicity in our lives. Cancer is a disease that unfortunalty touches everyone in our society, today. In her play Wit, Edson explores our need for human kindness. Today, more than ever, kindness and empathy are values we need to exemplify.
Reading and Study: As a means of introduction, I would like you read, view, and study the following materials. First, read the background on the play and view the trailer. Next, read the background and poems by John Donne. This sonnet is in the play. Next, read a selection from Beatrix Potter, which again, is in the play. These two drastically different works balance each other out with simplicity and complexity. Finally, read the beautifully movie story behind Margaret Edson, who won the highest literary honor the Pulitzer Prize, but decided to continue her life as a Kindergarten teacher in Atlanta.
Written Blog Response: When we completed our introductory study I would like you to compose a 300-500 word blog response covering what you learned about the Margaret Edson, Wit, Holy Sonnet VI and Beatrix Potter. Please include direct evidence from this post. You may also include questions and insights you would like to discuss in class. I look forward to your responses.
About the Play, Wit by Margaret Edson
By combining concepts of metaphysical poetry and human mortality within the complex mind of a dying scholar, Edson creates an extraordinary character of fortitude and wit. Edson's use of wit, referring to intelligence and wisdom, develops this multilayered work into a play about grace and redemption. An uncompromising look at cancer, the play shows how language has the power both to complicate and to ameliorate understanding. "The play is not about doctors or even cancer. It's about kindness, but it shows arrogance. It's about compassion, but it shows insensitivity," Edson explains. By showing the opposite of kindness, Edson's play effectively leaves the audience "yearning for kindness." Edson was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1999.
Edson's teaching career progressed along with the success of her play. Despite her newfound fame as a playwright, she continued teaching elementary school in Washington, D.C.–English as a second language for five years and first grade for one year—until she moved to Atlanta in 1998 and began teaching kindergarten.
Fully dedicated to teaching elementary school in her adopted town of Atlanta, Edson does not intend to write another play. She lives with her partner, Linda Merrill, and their two sons, Timmy and Pete.
Purcell, Kim. "Margaret Edson (b. 1961)." New Georgia Encyclopedia. 04 September 2013. Web. 29 January 2020.
John Donne and his "Holy Sonnet VI"
John Donne's Holy Sonnets are a group of 19 devotional sonnets that take on questions of Christian faith and salvation. Published in 1633 (nearly a decade after Donne's death), the precise order of the sonnets is debated by editors and Donne scholars. As such, the numerical assignment for each poem tends to vary from publication to publication, with scholars working from a number of circulated manuscripts from the period. Because the order of the Holy Sonnets is fundamentally unknown, it is important to approach them largely as individual poems rather than a coherent sequence, despite the fact that scholars have grouped certain sonnets together in a unanimously-acknowledged cohesive progression.
The Holy Sonnets open on a note of resignation as an unnamed speaker announces that he has resigned himself to God in the name of salvation. Anxious about his impending death, the speaker continues to wonder what kind of fate awaits him at the end of his life. Thrilled by the prospect of his soul ascending to heaven, the speaker agonizes over the sins he has committed on earth and begs forgiveness from God, only to express worry over slipping backward again into Satan's grasp.
The speaker continues to wonder whether God will pardon him in the end, and takes solace in the fact that the son of God, Christ, is merciful toward man. But the speaker also begins to contemplate seriously the process of death and the deterioration of his body, ultimately challenging the primacy of the body and refusing to fear death after all. Toggling back and forth between his own voice and the voice of Christ, the speaker imagines what death will feel like, look like, sound like, and be like in the end while also wondering why this type of promised salvation is only available to humanity.
Once the speaker has resigned himself to God, he continues to struggle with the notion of what, exactly, that means. As such, a number of the Holy Sonnets express complex and somewhat shocking relationships between the speaker and God. Asking to be beaten, ravished, and enthralled, the speaker begins to associate the process of religious cleansing with the experience of erotics and violence. The figure of God comes to represent not only the Christian "father" but also the Petrarchan Beloved whom the speaker must flatter and seduce despite his frustrations with how the affair will end.
As Judgment Day continues to approach, the speaker contemplates the relationship between the individual and the collective, imagining that his body is actually its own little world. Concerned with both his own demise and the apocalypse, the speaker continues to wonder what the end of life will look like and how the experience will feel. Noting that a woman he once loved has already died, the speaker becomes dedicated to acquiring God's mercy so that he will be able to join her in heaven. However, as the sonnets come to a close, the speaker is still unsure whether he is practicing the right form of devotion and whether he will be able to continue his pursuit of mercy while living in constant fear of imminent death.
"Holy Sonnet VI"(from the Gardner Ed.)
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so,
For those, whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow,
Die not, poor death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,
Much pleasure, then from thee much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee do go,
Rest of their bones, and soul's deliverie.
Thou'rt slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poyson, war, and sickness dwell,
And poppy, or charms can make us sleep as well,
And better than thy stroke; why swell'st thou then?
One short sleep past, we wake eternally,
And death shall be no more, Death thou shalt die.
Beatrix Potter and The Tale of the Flopsy Bunnies
The Tale of The Flopsy Bunnies is a children's book written and illustrated by Beatrix Potter, and first published in July 1909. After two full-length tales about rabbits, Potter had grown weary of the subject and was reluctant to write another. She realized however that children most enjoyed her rabbit stories and pictures, and so reached back to characters and plot elements from The Tale of Peter Rabbit (1902) and The Tale of Benjamin Bunny (1904) to create The Flopsy Bunnies. A semi-formal garden of archways and flowerbeds in Wales at the home of her uncle and aunt became the background for the illustrations.
From The Tale of the Flopsy Bunnies by Beatrix Potter
I have never felt sleepy after eating lettuces; but then I am not a rabbit.
They certainly had a very soporific effect upon the Flopsy Bunnies!
When Benjamin Bunny grew up, he married his Cousin Flopsy. They had a large family, and they were very improvident and cheerful.
I do not remember the separate names of their children; they were generally called the “Flopsy Bunnies.”
As there was not always quite enough to eat,—Benjamin used to borrow cabbages from Flopsy’s brother, Peter Rabbit, who kept a nursery garden.
Sometimes Peter Rabbit had no cabbages to spare.
When this happened, the Flopsy Bunnies went across the field to a rubbish heap, in the ditch outside Mr. McGregor’s garden.
Mr. McGregor’s rubbish heap was a mixture. There were jam pots and paper bags, and mountains of chopped grass from the mowing machine (which always tasted oily), and some rotten vegetable marrows and an old boot or two. One day—oh joy!—There were a quantity of overgrown lettuces, which had “shot” into flower.
The Flopsy Bunnies simply stuffed themselves with lettuces. By degrees, one after another, they were overcome with slumber, and lay down in the mown grass.
Benjamin was not so much overcome as his children. Before going to sleep he was sufficiently wide awake to put a paper bag over his head to keep off the flies.
The little Flopsy Bunnies slept delightfully in the warm sun. From the lawn beyond the garden came the distant clacketty sound of the mowing machine. The blue-bottles buzzed about the wall, and a little old mouse picked over the rubbish among the jam pots.
About the Author, Margaret Edson
A Teacher's 'Wit' and Wisdom
by Nelson Pressley, February 27, 2000
The paradox about Margaret Edson, widely celebrated playwright, is that she is not really a playwright. Edson herself has been saying so ever since she became a celebrated playwright last season, when her drama, "Wit," written nearly nine years ago, finally took the theater world by storm.
"Wit," about a stern college professor's battle with cancer, is still running in New York, where it won an armload of awards, including the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for drama. A production opened in Los Angeles last month, with more to come across the country. HBO is planning a film version. And Judith Light is starring in the national touring company, which opens this week at the Kennedy Center's Eisenhower Theater.
Yet despite all this, Edson, who teaches kindergarten at a public school in Atlanta, maintains that it is impossible for her to think of herself as a dramatist.
"I just wrote this one little play," she explains.
This, then, is a story about arguably the most famous kindergarten teacher in America.
On a cold winter night, Edson, 38, stands erect at the front of a conference room in a downtown Washington hotel, charming a few hundred members of the Association of American Colleges and Universities as she lectures on punctuation. The matching of speaker and topic seems sensible: In "Wit," a good deal of philosophy hangs on whether a key phrase in one of John Donne's Holy Sonnets should have a comma or a semicolon. In advertisements, on programs, even on the published play, the spelling of the title includes the semicolon: "W;t."
On Edson's cue, Rosalind Jones, one of her former professors at Smith College, reads from "Wit" with the playwright. Appropriately, Jones plays E.M. Ashford, a former professor of Vivian Bearing, the drama's main character. Edson plays Vivian, a cold, intimidating Donne scholar who has ovarian cancer. Between bouts of what is often brutal (and impersonal, given Vivian's brusque professional methods) medical treatment, Vivian's mind flashes back to scenes like the one Edson and Jones read.
"And death shall be no more, comma," argues Jones as Ashford to a younger Vivian. "Death thou shalt die."
When her role is done, Jones leaves the stage, but Edson keeps reading her own part; she doesn't want the scene to be interrupted by exit applause. This is a lecture, not a theater. What matters now is the lesson.
The next morning Edson, a Washington native, takes the stage of the arts center at Sidwell Friends, where she went to high school in the late 1970s. She talks about Derek Anson Jones, a close friend since their days at Sidwell.
Four days before this, Edson's triumphant return to her alma mater, Jones--who directed the New York and touring versions of "Wit"--died of complications from AIDS. Edson had planned to share the stage with him this morning. Unhappily, she can't, so she stands before the Sidwell crowd and remembers her times with Jones: the way he stole the show from her as Touchstone when she was playing Rosalind in "As You Like It" at Sidwell; the way he optimistically carried the script of the undiscovered "Wit" in his backpack for years as he was building his directing career in New York.
At the end of these sessions (and at the beginnings), Edson gets long, deeply appreciative ovations. Edson, oddly, stands stock still, impervious to the acclaim; she looks as if she's waiting for a bus. This is not what playwrights do. Playwrights bow or smile or wave or blush. Their instinct for dramatic action demands it.
Edson, on the other hand, merely waits--like a teacher--for the room to get quiet.
She'd Rather Teach
Margaret Edson wrote "this one little play" in Washington almost nine years ago. Nothing about her life up till then pointed to dramatic theatrical success.
She grew up across the street from American University; her father, who died in 1977, wrote for newspapers, and her mother continues her career as a social worker. Julia Louis-Dreyfus, later of "Saturday Night Live" and "Seinfeld," lived next door. The two girls would invent dramas with Barbie dolls or act out fantasies of being college girls.
She dabbled in drama at Sidwell, then went to Smith College, majoring in Renaissance history. Not finding herself particularly employable after graduating, she helped a friend move to Indiana, then settled outside Iowa City (where her sister lived) for a summer, selling hot dogs by day and working at night in a bar at the end of a dirt road. Then she went to Rome to live in a French convent for a year.
After Rome, she returned to Washington, landing a job in the cancer ward of a research hospital. Later she worked in publications at the St. Francis Center (now the Wendt Center for Loss and Healing), cranking out grant proposals.
In the summer of 1991, Edson quit her position at St. Francis and got a low-pressure job working in a bike shop near Tenley Circle. In effect, she was taking the summer off so she could write this one little play that had been taking shape in her mind, triggered in part by what she had seen of cancer treatment.
But she would allow herself only the summer to write. She was enrolled at Georgetown University for the fall, ready to pursue a master's in English. She wasn't setting out to become a writer.
"Oh, no," Edson says, horrified by the idea. "That would have been too dangerous for me."
Why does writing seem more dangerous than--
"Than saying, 'Now I'm going to be a waitress?' I don't know. I haven't thought about it." She pauses. "Because if you're a waitress, you're doing something. You're getting up and getting dressed every day and you're part of the world. And if you're a writer, you're just not good for anything. You're not in the mix when you're a writer. It just wouldn't do for me to be a writer."
What she wrote, that one time that she wrote, was rejected from coast to coast. Finally, in January 1995, South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa, Calif., produced "Wit." Edson says she was surprised at how unsurprising the experience was: "It happened exactly like it was in my mind, as though I was whispering to each person what to do. So instead of being astonished by it, it was . . . correct. That was the most exciting thing--to have it be exactly as I imagined it, to the tiniest detail, and to have strangers bringing that about. It was so proper, so correct, that it was thrilling. I was delirious. And that hasn't gone away."
But she says the production, which won a number of Los Angeles Drama Critics Awards, did not make her think, "Aha, I'm a playwright."
"Because I was a teacher by then," she says. "By the time it was produced, I was in my fourth year. I was really into it."
While she was completing her master's at Georgetown, Edson had begun teaching English as a second language through her church, St. Margaret's Episcopal on Connecticut Avenue.
"I started liking my tutoring more and more," she recalls, "and feeling less and less comfortable in the academy. So at the end of that year, it was clear to me that I wanted to be in the elementary classroom."
She launches into a topic that genuinely excites her: the alternative certification plan started by the D.C. school system eight years ago. She was in the inaugural group of the program, which allows promising people from other professions to begin teaching without first wading through the certification process, which Edson says takes at least a year (full time) to complete. Instead, they start teaching right away, taking certification classes at the same time.
"In inner-city schools," Edson says, "there's about a 40 percent exit rate in the first three years for teachers. Alternative certification programs have a much higher retention rate because people go into it knowing more about it. They're not 21. We were older and sadder and wiser, and had had some kind of experience in the classroom. So I taught ESL for five years, and I never could have done it without this program. It was really the big break of my life."
Moving On
It was Jones, whose years of study and dues-paying were beginning to yield fruit in and around New York in the mid-1990s, who finally got "Wit" produced on the East Coast. Artistic Director Doug Hughes agreed to let Jones direct it at the Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven, Conn., where it opened in October 1997. The play had been rejected for two years even after its success at South Coast Rep. Edson ticks off the reasons listed in her rejection letters: "cast size, subject, too much talk, too academic, too haughty, too unsure of itself, whether it was funny or sad. . . . Now people are scratching their heads about it. But it was unanimous."
The script was cut by an hour at South Coast by Edson (who hated the cuts at the time), dramaturge Jerry Patch and director Martin Benson. "The effect it has now, especially in Derek's production, is of this very fast-swerving drive," she says. "You're brought very quickly over to laughing and then ripped right back into something harrowing--very shocking, in fact. And it happens so quickly and smoothly in his production that it makes me seem like I really know what I'm doing." She laughs.
There is a thick streak of redemption running through "Wit" (and made abundantly clear in its final image) as Vivian Bearing comes to terms with her tough personality, her illness, her isolation and the implications of Donne's poetry. Edson, a Christian, says it's fair to say that she has written a Christian--though certainly not proselytizing--play, yet it is seldom described that way.
"And that's very interesting to me. To me, it's obvious. Duh."
Edson has said repeatedly--for she is invariably asked--that she will not write again until she feels she has something else to say. "If 'Wit' works, it's 'cause it's the one thing that I had in my heart," she insists. "And I'm not going to go and try to crank that up again."
Of course, the pressure of writing a follow-up to "Wit" would be enough to intimidate even more experienced writers.
"I don't think that's what's keeping her from doing it," says Linda Merrill, Edson's longtime partner, by phone from Atlanta. (Merrill, who wrote a number of scholarly art books while at the Freer Gallery for 13 years, is now curator of American art at Atlanta's High Museum of Art.) "She is very wrapped up in her other life, which is her life as a kindergarten teacher. That occupies so much of her thinking and her energy that she doesn't have a lot left over for anything else. So the rest of this is something that's going on somewhere else."
Edson says, "The job I have now, 'people person' doesn't even begin to describe it. I'm with my students every minute of the day--lunch, everything. So the isolated languor of the writer is just really not part of my world." She laughs again, and you can practically hear the relentlessly inquisitive voices of 5-year-olds buzzing in her ear.
Because she has achieved a degree of fame and fortune--and possibly because of the scholarly tone of her play--it confounds people that Edson continues to teach kindergarten. She got a hero's applause, for instance, from the university crowd when she was introduced as the toast of American theater and a public schoolteacher.
"It's a government job," she says later, rolling her eyes in a neat summation of the drab hassles implied by the phrase. "There's nothing heroic about it."
Still, teaching, given her circumstances, strikes people as a heroic choice.
Edson isn't buying it. "Ms. Rivers in the room next door has made the same choice," she says flatly. "Not out of the same number of options. But all my colleagues are doing the same thing I'm doing. People who know me slightly, or who have maybe read about me or heard about me, find it hard to understand. But to people who know me better, it makes perfect sense. They know the ways that I'm . . . odd."
"She loves to draw, for instance," says Merrill, who has known Edson for 20 years dating back to their days at Smith, "but she's not very good at it. They're funny little pictures, so they're just right for kindergartners. She's an excellent mimic--in fact, she used to take mime classes and she can imitate animals in amazing ways. And that's a skill that you wouldn't think she'd have occasion to use.
"Writing is a lonely profession," Merrill adds, "and it was hard for her to write the play. She likes having the immediate response from her students. And if there's something about it that isn't working, she can change it immediately. Whereas writing a play is a long, drawn-out process, and it's a long time before you know whether you've been effective."
Add to that the fact that Edson--a private school product--appears to be one of public education's evangelicals. To be in a public school is "critical" for her, she says. "Completely. The school where I teach is a Title One, free lunch/free breakfast school. My students are people who would be . . . well-served by good education." Her voice is very soft now; she is deeply serious. "I feel very clear about what I'm doing. I'm perfectly sure of the positive impact of what I'm doing. And I'm the only person I know who can say that. Except for the people down the hall, Ms. Rivers next door."
Yet once upon a time she wrote a play, and it became a very big hit. . . .
Edson comes up with an allegory to explain it.
"A friend of ours, in his garden, decided to build a shed. He'd never built anything, and he just got this idea that he was going to build this shed. And so he got all these books and plans, and he poured a foundation. For somebody who'd never built anything to build such a shed was incredible. He worked for the government, came home from work, and worked on this shed. And this was his . . . shed. And I was working on my play. We had the same spirit: that whatever else happens, I'm makin' my shed.
"So now," Edson concludes, "he has his shed. And I have my play."
