A dying woman examines her life in Manatee Players’ ‘Wit’

Margaret Edson is kind of like the Harper Lee of playwrights.

Edson wrote one play, which premiered in 1999. It was a critical and popular success and it won the Pulitzer Prize.

She never wrote another play, and reportedly has no plans to ever write another. She’s still teaching sixth grade at a public school in Atlanta.

Her one play is “Wit,” (or, as it’s often styled, “W;t”) and it’s next up from Manatee Players. It opens Thursday in the Bradenton Kiwanis Theater at the Manatee Performing Arts Center.

“This is a story about a woman who is reevaluating her life,” said Pam Wiley, who’s directing the Manatee Players production. “She is a tough, hard professor of Donne’s Holt Sonnets. That has been her entire life, her entire adult life. She has never married, never had children, never had friends, and she has stage IV ovarian cancer.”

The woman’s name is Vivian Bearing, and she’s played here by area theater stalwart Lynne Doyle (Mother Miriam Ruth in Manatee Players’ “Agnes of God” and Amanda Wingfield in Two Chairs Theatre’s “The Glass Menagerie”). She undergoes a transformation as she looks at her life. She has been isolated in her intellectual, academic existence — she can’t even come up with the name of someone that the hospital can list as an emergency contact — but coming close to death makes her more open and more caring about people.

Wiley said that in her production, the transformation in the woman’s outlook is central.

In other production that Wiley is familiar with, Vivian seems to stay hardened throughout. Wiley wanted to emphasize the change in Vivian’s outlook. Finding an actor who can accomplish that transformation believably was a challenge, she said, but Doyle carries it off.

The trick, Wiley and Doyle both said, was to make the transformation central to the production’s vision, but to avoid overdoing it.

“There’s an arc,” Doyle said. “She keeps getting pulled back. This has been her life. She has never let anyone in.”

“She missed out,” Wiley added.

Even though we’re watching a woman who seems to be drawing to the end of her life and enduring the effects of drastic and experimental chemotherapy when she’s only 50 years old, Doyle and Wiley said that “Wit” is often funny.

“There’s a lot of sarcasm and irony,” Doyle said. “It’s intelligent humor.”

Ultimately, they said, the show is sad, but it’s more poignant than depressing.

“This is not a play about cancer,” Doyle said. “It’s a play about what’s important in life.”

Details: Feb. 23-March 12, Bradenton Kiwanis Theater at the Manatee Performing Arts Center, 502 Third Ave, W., Bradenton. 7:30 p.m. Thursday, 8 p.m. Friday-Saturday, 2 p.m. Sunday. $26. 941-748-5875, manateeperformingartscenter.com.

This story was originally published February 22, 2017 at 1:43 PM with the headline "A dying woman examines her life in Manatee Players’ ‘Wit’."