In the following review excerpt, Wren calls Wit "gorgeously intellectual" and says "it often resembles a poem by Donne."
Such dual vision can be uncomfortable, even agonizing, as it is in another strikingly literary play that has taken New York by storm. The gorgeously intellectual Wit, elementary-school teacher Margaret Edson's remarkable first play, centers around a brilliant professor of English literature who is hospitalized with advanced ovarian cancer. As research-oriented oncologists swoop down to study her, Vivian Bearing, Ph.D. (played with well-calibrated shrewdness and occasional vulnerability by Kathleen Chalfant, a red baseball cap on her bald head), reflects on her own field of study, the poetry of John Dormer. With humor, irony, and a certain exhilaration, the play draws out contrasts and parallels between two kinds of knowledgemedical and literaryand two ways of approaching lifevia thought.....
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