The Theme Of Death In Margaret Edson's Wit

The play Wit by Margaret Edson is set in 1995 and it is at a hospital. The mood throughout the play is somber. The play is about professor Vivian Bearing. She gets diagnosed with stage four advanced metastatic ovarian cancer. This play shows her looking back on her past and trying to come to terms with the diagnosis. She decides to go along with a new experimental treatment. The treatment ends and its doesn’t work. She ends up dying. However, she never fully comes to terms with death, or the idea of death. Death can be logically understood but not emotionally understood. You can know you’re going to die, but you don’t understand it until you’re about to give up. This can be seen through the technical elements of the play, and through the phrasing in the play. Margaret Edson was born July fourth, nineteen ninety four. Her father Peter, was a journalist while her mother Joyce, was a social media worker. Edson went to Smith college. She spent two years working as a unit clerk in a hospital. She wrote Wit based off of some of her experiences of the hospital. Her goal with Wit was to tell a single story. The characters in this play are very different from one another. Yet, they add meaning to the play. Vivian is very professional and unforgiving. She doesn’t like to show her emotions on the matter of her death. Jason who was one of her …show more content…
This play was set in a hospital and Vivian wore a gown. Everyone else wore gloves and masks. This is crucial to understanding where they were. The stage directions were very important in the play. When Vivian got out of the hospital bed, she was teaching the audience. It would have been very hard to follow without the stage directions. It also shows what Vivian does. She cries in the middle of the play on Susie’s shoulders. This is crucial to the play. It shows Vivian’s tipping point. The time that she finally let’s all of that anger and sadness out. It shows her letting go of her