Wit Essay | Critical Essay #4

Wit Critical Essay #4

In the following review, Lamont discusses the final stage image in Wit and the play's connection to the work of poet John Donne.

In the concluding scene of Margaret Edson's Pulitzer Prize-winning play, WIT, we are shown Dr. Vivian Bearing, Ph.D. in English literature, and foremost scholar of John Donne's metaphysical "Holy Sonnets." rising from the hospital bed in which she just died of stage-four metastatic ovarian cancer. Slowly she loosens the ties of the two gowns she wears on top of one another throughout the play, constantly ready for an invasive pelvic examination by a team of cancer specialists and their students. She discards the baseball cap she wears over her skull, bare of hair following eight cycles of chemotherapy, and takes off her ID hospital bracelet. Deliberately, almost in slow motion, she pulls off her gown, standing naked, her arms raised. The stage directions read "The instant...
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