WIT
by Margaret Edson

FOUR PERFORMANCES ONLY!
Friday and Saturday, March 11, 12, 18 & 19, 2005
8 PM
Unison Arts and Learning Center
Mountain Rest Road in New Paltz
Admission: $9 for Unison members
and $12 for non-members
Call Unison at 255-1559 for reservations
* * *

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, the Drama Desk Award, the Outer Critics Circle Award, the Lucille Lortel Award, and the Oppenheimer Award

In this extraordinary play, Margaret Edson has created a work that is as intellectually challenging as it is emotionally immediate. At the start of Wit , Vivian Bearing, Ph.D., a renowned professor of English who has spent years studying and teaching the brilliantly difficult Holy Sonnets of the metaphysical poet John Donne, has been diagnosed with terminal ovarian cancer. Her approach to her illness is not unlike her approach to the study of Donne: aggressively probing and intensely rational. But during the course of her illness, Vivian comes to reassess her life and her work with a profundity and humor that are transformative. As the playwright herself puts it, "The play is not about doctors or even about cancer. It's about kindness, but it shows arrogance. It's about compassion, but it shows insensitivity."

Wit wrestles with timeless questions with no final answers: How should we live our lives knowing that we will die? How does language figure into our lives? Can science and art help us conquer death, or our fear of it? What will seem most important to each of us about life as that life comes to an end? The clarity and elegance of Edson's writing make this a sophisticated and multilayered play.

RoseMarie Navarra directs this exceptionally strong MMSC ensemble with Elizabeth Barrows, Barbara Scanlon, Rick Meyer, Janet Nurre, Jessica Napolitano, Laurence Carr, Don Wildy and Christine Crawfis as Vivian Bearing.

	"A dazzling and humane play you will remember till your dying day." John Simon New York Magazine
	"[A] brutally human and beautifully layered new play . . . You will feel both enlightened and, in a strange way, enormously comforted." Peter Marks The New York Times
	"A one-of-a-kind experience: wise, thoughtful, witty and wrenching." Vincent Canby The New York Times Year in Review
	"A thrilling, exciting evening in the theater . . . An extraordinary and most moving play." Clive Barnes New York Post
	"Among the finest plays of the decade . . . An original and urgent work of art." David Lyons The Wall Street Journal
Rick Meyer (Photo Credit: Marlis Momber)	"Wit is exquisite . . . an exhilarating and harrowing 90-minute revelation." Linda Winer Newsday
Janet Nurre (Photo Credit: Marlis Momber)	"Edson writes superbly . . . [A] moving, enthralling and challenging experience that reminds you what theater is for." Fintan O'Toole New York Daily News