Hit Wit

>> Pulitzer-winning play shines at Centaur

by AMY BARRATT

When Margaret Edson's play Wit won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1999, regional theatres across North America began scrambling to get it into their seasons. Centaur Theatre's production, which opened last week, could hold its own against any company on the continent.

As a text, Wit's unsentimental depiction of a 50-year-old woman's battle with cancer is near-perfect. Director David Latham knows when to stand back and just let the play work its magic. I believe the lead character herself--tough, unsentimental English professor Vivian Bearing would approve.

Bearing is played at Centaur by Rosemary Dunsmore, a great Canadian actress we haven't seen nearly enough of on Montreal stages. Much will be made of her willingness to shave her head and look truly dreadful as the terminal patient, but these are not the things that make her performance riveting. It is the way she portrays not the patient, but the human being who finds herself reduced, in the minds of her doctors, to a case, or a biology experiment. "I am a scholar. Or I was," she says wryly, "when I had shoes, when I had eyebrows."

Although we only ever see Vivian padding about in bare feet and ball cap, the play gives us a strong sense of the formidable presence, the intimidating brilliance of this expert on John Donne's poetry. Vivian is prickly, not cuddly. She doesn't want pity, she wants respect. And while suffering through the immense indignities of cancer treatment, she never lets us reduce her to a victim.

The play is theatrical, with Vivian frequently stepping out of the action of her story to directly address the audience. David Gaucher's set design, like his work on Centaur's Waiting for Godot, is a wonder of simplicity. A few moving panels in a sickly hospital green create various settings without ever slowing the action. This is a tight play--under two hours with no intermission--and there's no time for blackouts. Luc Prairie's lighting sticks to an appropriately cold palette and the exposed lighting grid emphasizes the sense that Vivian is a specimen under observation in a lab.

Wit portrays the stock character of the insensitive doctor in the persons of the middle-aged Dr. Kelekian (Peter Millard) and his quartet of 12-year-old med students. What's new and fascinating in the dynamic between them and Vivian is that, even as she suffers under their professional indifference, she respects them as serious researchers like herself. In their place, she realizes, she would behave exactly as they do.

Latham has assembled a fine ensemble cast, and that despite the fact that Wit is essentially a star vehicle. Carolyn Hetherington, who has proved her star quality to Centaur audiences in The Beauty Queen of Leenane and Driving Miss Daisy, shows she's no prima by accepting a small role in Wit. Also featured are Paula Jean Hixson and Ian Watson.

A play about terminal cancer is a hard sell to theatregoers. Particularly if you've lost someone to cancer, Wit is rough going. But if you love good theatre, and realize how rare it is that all the elements come together to make art, you must go see Wit.

Somewhat unfortunately, Centaur has programmed its Wild Side Festival concurrent with Wit. Underway since Tuesday, five plays play in rep over 11 days. The Two Trees, a one-man play about the poet Yeats, is my best bet. Also featured are The Median Strip, by Richard Strand, See Bob Run, by Daniel MacIvor, Surviving Wor(l)ds, by Endre Farkas, and The Darling Family, by Linda Griffiths.

Wit, to Feb. 18; Wild Side Festival Jan. 30-Feb. 10, both at Centaur Theatre; box office at 288-3161