Wit

Samuel J. Friedman Theatre New York

(212) 239-6200

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Much of what makes Margaret Edson’s 1995 play so moving is that it’s “a work of delicately calibrated opposites,” said David Rooney in The Hollywood Reporter. Its protagonist, poetry scholar Vivian Bearing, is dying from ovarian cancer, but she ensures, by force of an intensely analytic personality, that “dry humor” and “detached clinical observation” accompany the “raw human emotion” of her final days. Cynthia Nixon, the Sex and the City star who is herself a cancer survivor, delivers a “shattering” performance that in its efficiency “mirrors the laser-like precision of Edson’s writing.” Justifying Wit’s first appearance on Broadway, she captures all the “wrenching pathos” and spiky humor in the Pulitzer Prize–winning script.

When Kathleen Chalfant played this role in its memorable 1998 off-Broadway run, “she owned the part,” said Elisabeth Vincentelli in the New York Post. Nixon, by comparison, seems “more of a renter.” Certainly hers is a committed performance: The actress shaved her head for the part, and she convincingly portrays the devastating physical effects of cancer and its treatments. Still, Nixon has “a certain solemn, brittle coldness” that keeps the audience at arm’s length. This does keep our focus on the unfolding play, which “turns out to be better than remembered.” But Nixon’s Vivian is a person more easily admired than empathized with.

The very formal, very cerebral Vivian wouldn’t have it any other way, said Ben Brantley in The New York Times. Nixon’s stiff demeanor in early scenes may reflect the character’s apparent belief that “artifice is her best defense against the mortal pain and immortal darkness that await her.” The coldly clinical internist who’s treating her (a “very good” Greg Keller) is a former student of hers who obviously adopted the same mode. Yet as Wit continues, “it and Nixon’s performance cut closer to the bone”; Vivian’s façade melts away into complete emotional transparency. In the end, “nothing gets in the way of our aching awareness” that the intense blue eyes of one singular woman “are about to close forever.”