Dov Zeller's Reviews > Wit

I am going to refrain from giving this stars (a practice I am trying out.)

There are already some really good reviews on gr. I am not going to thoroughly review the play, but I do want to say a bit about my ambivalent response.

This is a play narrated by a woman dying of metastatic cancer. Before getting sick she was a hard-core academic and her focus was 17th century poetry, particularly John Donne. She has very little access to emotional connection. She intellectualizes just about everything. And before getting sick, she was uncompromising and inflexible. Moreover, it seems she had zero friends.

What I think both makes this play work and also, at the same time, kind of unravels its power, is the structure. There are a lot of echoing themes. The Bunny books by Margaret Wise Brown. The poetry of John Donne. Vivian's emotional spininess. The doctors' coldness and the nurse's warmth. They sort of produce an emotional reaction, but I found mine fizzled out into a bit of frustration.

Basically, while I appreciate very much that this play addresses the utter failure of doctors to treat patients compassionately, and while I appreciate the ways that it tries to explore the question of institutional expectations versus human connection, I also find it relies too heavily on stereotypes and formal repetitions. It's a little like I'm been force fed my peas and carrots.

Moreover, and more importantly, I was really freaking icked-out by the whole nurse being the intellectually inferior but emotionally care-takey character. My biggest fear, reading it, was that someone would cast the nurse as the wise black female archetype whose job it is in American cultural productions to emotionally support the poor old white woman and serve as a bridge to her emotional world.

And, well, I looked at the movie cast just out of curiosity (while writing this today -- I read the play yesterday) and what do you know, that's exactly what happened in the film version. Ugh.

Maybe I would find this play a little more tolerable if the casting were to undermine some of the banal crepe. How about cast a woman of color as Vivian. Have the nurse be a white guy. (A boy named Sue.) I don't know. But as things are, I'm not so excited about the play.

That said, I am glad I read it. And glad I read the reviews of some folks who really liked it. Who felt comforted by a play that spoke to their experiences of loss and illness.

And reading the play reminded me of how much I enjoy reading scripts (plays, film scripts) and writing them, too.

So, this play is a mixed bag. There are things to admire in it and many things, also, to rail against. And so I do both. And prepare to read some plays by Mishima. And this is where my review ends.