You would think that a play is something you should be able to read in a day. After all, a plays performance shouldn't last longer than a day. Nobody would see it otherwise. But there have been times when reading a whole play in a day was difficult for me. Shakespeare plays in high school took me a fair amount of time, and The Cursed Child took me two days (real life kept interrupting my reading time). And the first time I read this play it took me two days. I was in college, engaged to my husband, and so wrapped up in wedding plans that I am surprised that I managed to get any school work done at all. I'm glad I reread this play though. It is beautiful and so very real.
Wit is a play about a professor of 17th century poetry who has been diagnosed with stage four ovarian cancer. The whole play is a fourth wall break and shows the final moments of her life broken up with different flashbacks.
As its name suggests, this play is pretty witty. The main character is sharp, quick, and uses a fair amount of sarcasm. She also made a name for herself in academics showing the "wit" of John Donne's poems. The whole theme and point of the play is how wit is just a cover for or protection against reality or truth. The character has spent all her time so caught up in the intellectual fluff of life that she has failed to see the deeper, cleaner, and simpler truth of life and death. It is only through her experience as a dying cancer patient, when wit and fluff is stripped away from her, that she can see it. My favorite part was when her old professor came to visit her just before her final hours. She wasn't all together there and so the professor read her a children's book she had gotten for a great-grandchild. The story was an allegory of a person always wanting to run away from God or Truth but never being able to do so and, in the end, embracing that which they denied so strongly.
This was a beautiful play.
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