Theater: Samuel J. Friedman / 261 West 47th Street, New York, NY,
Synopsis:
Margaret Edson's Wit follows brilliant and exacting poetry professor Vivian Bearing (to be played by Cynthia Nixon) as she undergoes experimental treatment for cancer. A scholar who devoted her life to academia, she must now face the irony and injustice of becoming the subject of research.
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January 26, 2012: Cynthia Nixon’s gaze has its own grammar. Playing a terminally ill English professor in the inescapably moving new revival of Margaret Edson’s “Wit,” the 1999 Pulitzer Prize winner for drama, Ms. Nixon seems to construct perfectly composed, illuminating and surprising thoughts with her sky-blue eyes — the kind of thoughts that if you saw them in print would make you stop and savor and reread.
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January 26, 2012: Cynthia Nixon’s unsparing performance makes Margaret Edson’s celebrated play a powerfully moving experience.
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January 26, 2012: It took more than a decade for "Wit," school teacher Margaret Edson's insightful medical drama, to make it to Broadway. But as demonstrated by Manhattan Theatre Club's elegant and intimate revival starring "Sex and the City's" Cynthia Nixon, "Wit" was well worth the wait.
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January 26, 2012: Margaret Edson's "Wit" is one of a surprisingly large number of plays that managed to win a Pulitzer Prize without first making it to Broadway. Fourteen years after it opened Off-Broadway, "Wit" is finally being presented by the Manhattan Theatre Club in its Broadway house. Why the delay? No doubt the release of Mike Nichols's 2001 cable-television version, which starred Emma Thompson, had something to do with it.
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February 26, 2012: Margaret Edson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning drama “Wit” offers a lucky — and brave — actress a complex, finely detailed role that’s as demanding as it is rewarding. When the play first opened off-Broadway, in 1998, Kathleen Chalfant more than took on Vivian Bearing, an English-lit professor dying of ovarian cancer. She owned that part.
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January 26, 2012: It's hard to imagine anyone but Kathleen Chalfant as the overbearing but brilliant Dr. Vivian Bearing, the frosty classical scholar finding her humanity as she faces ovarian cancer in Margaret Edson's Pulitzer Prize–winning "Wit."
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February 26, 2012: Having missed Kathleen Chalfant in a role that she was apparently born to play—Dr. Vivian Bearing in Margaret Edson’s powerful medical drama, Wit—I can’t weigh her performance against Cynthia Nixon’s in the Manhattan Theatre Club revival. But it is easy to imagine that Chalfant’s patrician starch and throaty low register perfectly conveyed a literature professor who can anatomize verse as easily as she verbally flays her students. Nixon has an innate warmth and coltishness that works against her, and she struggles in the first third of Lynne Meadow’s production to project sufficient froideur and hauteur. Still, it’s a testament to this remarkable play and Nixon’s skill that we ultimately believe her as the cancer-stricken teacher. Believing, we also weep at her fate.
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January 26, 2012: When Cynthia Nixon last appeared on Broadway in 2006, she was cast as a woman reeling from the death of her 4-year-old son. The play, Rabbit Hole, earned a Pulitzer Prize for its witty, tender insights into an impossibly heart-wrenching subject, and Nixon received a Tony Award for her similarly smart, nuanced performance.
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