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Hi. How are you feeling today?" These words, the play's first, are pretty plain indeed, the kind of words you use when you really couldn't care less how someone's feeling. We know this, as does Dr. Vivian Bearing, the terminal cancer patient at the center of Margaret Edson's shattering drama, "Wit." Bearing up
By Scott Vogel
svogel@starbulletin.com"I have been asked 'How are you feeling today?' while I was throwing up into a plastic washbasin. I have been asked as I was emerging from a four-hour operation with a tube in every orifice, 'How are you feeling today?'
"I am waiting for the moment when someone asks me this question and I am dead. I'm a little sorry I'll miss that."
It's Dr. Bearing's insightful, humorous and, yes, witty observations on death and dying that made "Wit," opening next Wednesday at Manoa Valley Theatre, an instant phenomenon from the moment it opened Off Broadway in 1998. Seemingly the tale of a brilliant English professor (she specializes in the poetry of John Donne) and her ill-fated battle against ovarian cancer, it might have played as Disease of the Week fare. But first-time playwright Edson went one step further, positing the acceptance of death as a challenge of sorts, and one for which some of us are better prepared than others.
HBO's adaptation of "Wit," starring Emma Thompson, will screen at 6 and 8 p.m. Thursday at the Movie Museum, 3566 Harding Ave., Suite 4. 'Wit' on screen
The film, directed by Mike Nichols, is rated PG-13. Tickets are $5 general and $4 for members. Reservations are recommended. Call 735-8771.
"You're able to see a picture of a person's life that not many people get to see, and that's the end of their life," said Beth Freitas, who is manager of the Cancer and Neuroscience Institute at Queen's Medical Center and an adviser to the "Wit" production team. "And the choices that people make at the end of their life are all definitely contingent upon their values and beliefs."
It's a message with special meaning for those who work with cancer patients, Freitas said, who can always use a reminder that "there's a person behind the research, that there's a person behind those statistics.
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"We can say we have a cure rate of 60 percent, but what about the other 40 percent?"For some, we can safely assume that their last days will be spent like Bearing's, surrounded by blinking, blipping monitors, their bodies suspended from IV tubes and catheters, their final words uttered amid strangers in a ward. It isn't a pretty picture, and "Wit" doesn't shrink from the indignities visited by modern medicine. In fact, Edson's script specifically asks that an oncology nurse be part of any production of her play. Perhaps that's why Freitas pronounces "Wit" medically accurate, especially given when the play was first written (1991). Then again, there are limits.
"I mean, we can't physically do CPR on (Betty Burdick, the actress playing Bearing) because we could potentially kill her if we do that. You could break her bones or actually cause her heart to go into an irregular rhythm. We're not doing it to that realism, and we don't shock her."
This latter point will no doubt come as a relief to Burdick, who has enough to worry about, namely bringing the complex Bearing to life. Onstage from the first moment of "Wit" to the last, the actress is facing enormous challenges both emotional and physical. (Yes, she shaved her head.) But it's all worth it for the role of a lifetime.
"I try to take a day off from it once a week where I don't think about it at all," she admitted, calling the rehearsal experience "intense" and Edson's play "a humbling gift."
Where: Manoa Valley Theatre, 2833 E. Manoa Road 'Wit'
When: 7:30 p.m. Wednesdays and Thursdays; 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays; 4 p.m. Sundays, through June 2.
Cost: $25 general; $20 for seniors and military; $10 for those ages 25 and under
Call: 988-6131
Also: Benefit performance with heavy pupu 7:15 p.m. Tuesday will benefit the American Cancer Society. Tickets are $80 ($40 tax deductible). Call 595-7544.
"One of the great things about doing this role is that I keep collecting stories," added Burdick, whose mother died of ovarian cancer in 1990. "You mention it to people and they go, 'Oh, well, I survived this' or 'Some member of my family survived it.' It's something that touches everybody in some way."
Perhaps it's the sobering universality of cancer that accounts for the resonance of "Wit." Or could it be the deftness with which it thrusts a very rational woman into the ultimate in irrational situations? Or maybe it's the simultaneous fascination and repulsion we all have about death, the way its inevitability dances in and out of our consciousness. For Freitas, as perhaps for Edson, it's the way the anticipation of death can be woven into the tapestry of life.
"Here's a woman who's at the end of her life, who, as she jokingly says at the beginning, 'they've only given two hours.' She has that reality on her face, and that reality helps to keep your priorities as to what's really important."
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