Margaret Edson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning drama “Wit” offers a lucky — and brave — actress a complex, finely detailed role that’s as demanding as it is rewarding. When the play first opened off-Broadway, in 1998, Kathleen Chalfant more than took on Vivian Bearing, an English-lit professor dying of ovarian cancer. She owned that part.
In the play’s Broadway premiere, which opened last night, Cynthia Nixon is more of a renter.
A good one, mind you. Nixon takes care of the furniture. She’s respectful, reliable and committed, having shaved everything for the role. Under the direction of Manhattan Theatre Club boss Lynne Meadow, she embraces Vivian — or Dr. Bearing, as this very formal woman would no doubt prefer to be called.
But Nixon also has a certain solemn, brittle coldness — the humorous lines in this surprisingly funny play don’t always land — and keeps the audience at arm’s length. You admire her Vivian, but you don’t necessarily empathize with her.
“Wit,” Edson’s one and only play — she’s the Harper Lee of theater — follows Vivian as she battles advanced cancer and the “full-force” chemotherapy that’s almost worse than the disease.
“You must be very tough,” her oncologist, Dr. Kelekian (Michael Countryman), says about the treatment. “Do you think you can be very tough?”
“You needn’t worry,” Vivian replies flatly.
Though she spends the entire show in a hospital gown and a red baseball cap, looking vulnerable, Vivian narrates her final days with zero sentimentality — no upbeat, pink-ribbon-style empowerment for her. This is a woman with a finely tuned bulls – – t detector, and Nixon plays her briskly, almost curtly, as if Vivian had a case of Asperger’s syndrome.
A 17th-century authority, especially with regard to John Donne’s Holy Sonnets, Vivian can lose herself in the beauty of words, while at the same time being very literal. She brings the same uncompromising attention to punctuation and human beings. As a result, she’s socially isolated — her one visitor is her old university mentor, E.M. Ashford (Suzanne Bertish, sterling in her two short scenes) — and only relates to a kind nurse, Susie (a warmly understated Carra Patterson).
An upside of not being absorbed by an emotionally overwhelming performance is that you can focus more on the play itself — and it turns out to be better than remembered. The way Edson gradually fills in the blanks of Vivian’s personality rings true, as is the scholar’s discovery of her own humanity. The parallel between Vivian and a dedicated but tone-deaf clinical fellow (Greg Keller) is also spot-on.
Through it all, Edson is never didactic, and spares us the obvious clichés about feeling being superior to thinking.
Until the end, Vivian finds comfort in stories and words, even if they’re not sophisticated poems. She’s never a patient or a victim, but an individual.