SOURCE: Winer, Laurie. “Wit Probes Bleak Poetry of Death at South Coast.” Los Angeles Times (30 January 1995): 3.

In the following review of the Los Angeles production of Wit, Winer states that the play is “a little short of reaching its full potential.”

[In Edson's Wit,] Vivian Bearing, Ph.D., believes she understands life and death. She is, after all, the country's foremost scholar on the 17th-century poet John Donne, who, she says, explored mortality “better than any other writer in the English language.”

The trouble is, Dr. Bearing has stage-four ovarian cancer and “there is no stage five.” The doctors with whom she consults don't have time to debate the fine points of metaphysical poetry. Adrift in awful, uncharted territory, she begins to sense that though Donne gave her a way to live, he is going to be almost no use at all in helping her find a way...