Summary

Scene 1 (p. 5-7)

Vivian Bearing greets the audience while wearing a hospital robe and hooked up to an IV. She is in the hospital for stage 4 metastatic ovarian cancer and she’s been told she has less than two hours to live. Vivian is a professor of seventeenth century poetry, specializing in John Donne’s Holy Sonnets. She acknowledges this is a play about herself and speaks of ideas of death found in poetry. She disconnects the tube from the IV pole and the scene shifts.

Scene 2 (p. 7-16)

Doctor Kelekian appears and Vivian enters the scene with him. He breaks the news that she has advanced metastatic ovarian cancer. He explains this cancer went undetected in its first three stages of existence but now it is an insidious adenocarcinoma. Vivian picks up on the word insidious – which the doctor defines as undetectable...