Floridian: A 'Wit' of quiet bearing

A 'Wit' of quiet bearing

The Pulitzer Prize-winning play is now a movie. Whether or not the move from stage to small screen preserves the taut drama's richly metaphorical nature depends upon whom you ask.

By ERIC DEGGANS

Let the great debate begin.

As HBO's showy rendition of the Pulitzer Prize-winning play Wit unfolds on TV screens nationwide, critics have already written volumes on the central question at hand.

Does it measure up?

Curiously, it's a debate in which the playwright, Margaret Edson, refuses to engage.

Fresh from a star-studded premiere in New York City, Edson would allow only that HBO's Wit is "quiet and still . . . almost performed in a whisper" compared to the "grand and public" theatrical version.

"A woman standing alone commanding a stage in a live theater has to have a heroic quality to drive the evening through," adds the author, reached at her home in Atlanta, where she still teaches elementary school. "It's interesting to see the text performed in a medium that doesn't require that grandeur. It was fun for me to let the play speak for itself."

Edson may be used to trusting others with her play -- she recently learned there are 150 professional and amateur productions of the work already underway -- but fans of the various stage productions may have a different reaction.

Starring Oscar-winner Emma Thompson (Sense and Sensibility, Howards End) and directed by Oscar and Tony winner Mike Nichols (Primary Colors, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, The Graduate), HBO's Wit certainly has a quality pedigree. Renowned playwright Harold Pinter even makes an extended cameo as the father of lead character Vivian Bearing.

It's a story that seems genetically designed to attract a strong female lead -- focused on the excruciating decline of a formidable poetry professor who accepts an experimental and debilitating treatment for terminal ovarian cancer.

Attended by impersonal doctors who seem interested only in her value as a research case (including Back to the Future's Christopher Lloyd, in an oddly appropriate role), Vivian Bearing slowly loses all the trappings of achievement and ability that she has used to insulate herself from the truth of her condition.

Her formidable wit and intimidating spirit are among the dearest losses, forcing Bearing (not too much symbolism in the name, eh?) to face death alone and defenseless.

Throughout the work, Edson weaves the words of 17th century poet John Donne -- a metaphysical artist Bearing has spent much of her life studying. Edson uses his verse to add deeper meaning.

"Death be not proud, though some have called thee mighty and dreadfull," says Thompson's Bearing, quoting Donne's Holy Sonnet Six while sitting in hospital stirrups, waiting long minutes while her doctor searches for a nurse. "Die not poore death, nor yet canst thou kill mee . . ."

"It's really all about metaphor, isn't it?" says Nichols, in a January press conference. "The character that Emma plays (specializes) in John Donne . . . her life is metaphor and teaching metaphor. And . . . one of the wonders of Wit is that it grows and grows and is about far more than the death of one person."

Accordingly, Thompson throws herself into a role that demands much of its actors, shaving off her hair to play a character crushed by a series of full-strength chemotherapy treatments that no one expects her to survive.

"I think that giving birth helped me to find a way of convincing you that I was dying," says Thompson, whose first daughter, Gaia Romilly Wise, was born months before production started on Wit last year.

"Birth is a great labor, and death, if you speak to people who deal with those who are dying, is very hard work," she adds. "I suppose the only convincing tool I had at my disposal . . . to show dying was my breath, my breathing, and that's what you use in labor as well."

It's an intimate performance in which Thompson often addresses the camera, as an offhand confessional of sorts.

"I am in isolation because I'm being treated for cancer," Thompson's Bearing says, after she is placed in a germ-free environment because the chemotherapy has destroyed her immune system. "My treatment is actually a hazard to my health."

The TV version doesn't sit well with playwright/actor/director Monica Bishop Steele, who brought a critically acclaimed version of Wit to the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center for one month last year.

Steele, 47, watched an advance tape of HBO's Wit and said she couldn't help feeling troubled by how much of the play's heart seemed to be missing.

"The film . . . is a careful and clean telling of the story," says Steele, who still keeps a plastic box filled with the hair she shaved off to play Bearing.

"I watched it and said, "This is a person who seems resigned (to eventual death).' That journey of being in control -- thorough, driven, demanding excellence, then you face this thing in your life you can't control. That simple point is missed."

HBO's version does show Bearing in flashbacks as an imperious instructor. But, perhaps to make the character more likable, the professor seems resigned to her fate from the film's beginning. (Cutting the play's opening speech by a hairless, deep-in-treatment Bearing, the movie starts as she is first diagnosed with cancer.)

"Being examined by a former student is thoroughly degrading, and I use that term deliberately," Bearing says in the film, moments after receiving a pelvic exam. "I wish I'd given him an "A.' "

There are other changes. In HBO's version, Bearing is 48 instead of 50 (think Thompson, 41, didn't want to play a 50-year-old?), and a line in which the professor insults her nurse's intelligence is also excised.

But the biggest change comes at the play's end. On stage, as health care workers fight over whether to resuscitate her, Bearing drops her cap, bracelet and hospital gown, reaching naked toward a light (in Steele's version, she had help from a mysterious figure).

In HBO's Wit, the last scene shows her dead body lying on a hospital gurney, as Thompson recites Holy Sonnet Six.

"The (play's) final image wasn't one of desperate sadness, it was one of gentle hope," says Steele, who still slips into the first person when talking about Vivian Bearing. "I wasn't alone. The final moment of death is just a comma. It's the getting there that's fraught with terror."

There are other questions. Would Bearing be dying alone if she were a man with the same driven, exacting personality? Is there a subtle message here for women?

And why is the only African-American character a nurse/caretaker who becomes Bearing's friend and sidekick, Susie Monahan (Broadway star Audra McDonald)?

The pair's moments together -- such as sharing a Popsicle as they discuss whether Bearing wants to be revived should her heart stop -- are touching (though a scene where they joke about Monahan's ignorance of the word "soporific" seems a little condescending).

Still, McDonald's devoted nurse is often the only kind of character actors of color are allowed to play in such hospital/health dramas, including Whose Life is It, Anyway?, My Life and Nichols' own Regarding Henry. Perceptive about life but the least powerful medical professional in the room, these "earth mother" types evoke a friendly stereotype that rankles.

These are all issues Edson hears patiently, but declines to directly answer -- preferring, it seems, to let producers, directors, actors and viewers make their own choices.

She has lived with the play a long time, writing the script in 1991 only to see nearly every reputable theater company in the country reject it. Eventually, Wit won a Pulitzer Prize in 1999, prompting four producers to compete for the rights to make a film, including HBO.

The author still laughs while recalling a lunch meeting with Thompson, Nichols and his wife, ABC News anchor Diane Sawyer.

"They're all so witty, it was like watching a tennis match," she says -- a rare shot of glamor for an elementary school teacher who purposefully kept her distance from HBO's production and has no plans to write another play.

And what would she hope HBO's viewers glean after 90 minutes spent with Vivian Bearing?

"Somebody I knew in college wrote me a card (saying), "I think everyone who sees the play feels closer to the ones they came with by the end,' " Edson says. "That's what I hope happens here."

* * *

AT A GLANCE: Wit airs at 9 p.m. Saturday on HBO. Grade: B+. Rating: TV-14.