Theater Review: 'Wit' at Palo Alto Players: austere, compelling, magnificent Theater Review: 'Wit' at Palo Alto Players: austere, compelling, magnificent (February 02, 2005)

By Bryan Wiggin

Almanac Theater Critic

Long before the performance was over, I knew I was having a great experience of theater. As I walked to my car, I was shaking my head, trying to believe it was real.

It was and it is.

"Wit" is the Pulitzer Prize-winning play by Margaret Edson. It's being presented by Palo Alto Players at the Lucie Stern Theatre in Palo Alto.

The director is Mike Ward. Four years ago, he directed "Three Tall Women," by Edward Albee, for the same company, and I was tremendously impressed. His achievement here is even more impressive.

This shows especially in the final scenes of the play, where he boldly stretches the tempo until we are almost frozen in stillness and silence. It takes courage to draw the narrative tension into such a fine and perilous thread, and it takes the skill of a master to sustain that tension.

Mr. Ward succeeds; the audience is held rapt; and if there is any justice in the universe, his career will be a great one.

In the Albee play, the central character is an elderly woman of the New England aristocracy brought low by the degrading infirmities of old age. In "Wit," Vivian Bearing is an aristocrat of intellect, a scholar of 17th century metaphysical poets specializing in the Holy Sonnets of John Donne.

As performed by Susan Jackson, she has the hubris of a character in Greek tragedy. Her intellectual integrity is unflinching -- and unsparing. Any of her students with the perspicacity to feel her disapproval will feel its crushing force.

Now, at 50, Vivian has terminal ovarian cancer. As it corrodes her body, she struggles heroically to maintain her dignity. But to Harvey Kelekian, the doctor in overall charge of her case, she is little more than an object, useful for testing the newest and most powerful medications. John Musgrave gives Kelekian the arrogance of a healer who no longer sees the humanity of his patients.

As Jason Posner, the resident directly in charge of Vivian's care, Anil Margsahayam has the breezy confidence of someone who knows his own brilliance. But he is a former student of Vivian, and as he prepares to give her a pelvic exam, cracks appear in his confidence. Mr. Margsahayam's performance has great subtlety here: It shows his discomfort, but never sinks into burlesque. Credit the actor? Credit the director? Both, I think.

For me, the finest performance, if only by a thin margin, is that of Deborah Napier as Susie Monahan, Vivian's primary nurse. If invalided in a hospital, you would thank a beneficent God, or come to believe in one, if you received the care of such an angelic spirit.

Sweet and simple, she is unfailingly sympathetic and kind. And late in the play, when she rubs moisturizing lotion on the hands of Vivian, who is long lost in the unconsciousness of her disease and the drugs that cannot save her, Ms. Napier does so with such gentleness, such tenderness, such loving kindness, that the moment is almost unbearably poignant.

I can't bring myself to call a performance perfect, but that of Ms. Napier taxes my restraint.

Liz Barbour is excellent as E.M. Ashford -- only initials, nothing so fallibly human as a feminine forename -- Vivian's intellectually uncompromising mentor.

As Vivian declines, she moves back and forth between the literary exegesis that has been her life, and terror at the inexorability of her approaching death. Ms. Jackson is commanding in her portrayal of these wrenching, excruciating shifts.

During the 15 years I have written theater reviews for the Almanac, I have seen many fine productions. Few have been the peer of this; none has been its better.
INFORMATION

"Wit," by Margaret Edson, is being presented by Palo Alto Players at the Lucie Stern Theatre in Palo Alto through February 6. For information, call 329-0891 or go to www.paplayers.org.

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