The ability to lock onto and connect with Vivian’s point of view is absolutely essential to putting the play’s themes across-witness how often she directly addresses the audience as their guide through her own past and deeper into her own consciousness-because it becomes increasingly imperative that audiences members fill in the missing role of family that would normally be such an essential factor in the narrative. This metaphorical dimension has the oddly unexpected and rather unique consequence of making the external interaction becoming subordinate to Vivian’s interior conflict while at the very same time accentuating the internal.
Vivian’s cancer is, one might even go so far to suggest, is the play’s most idiosyncratic character. The cancer eating away inside her body is most assuredly palpable and personal, but the disease is also symbolic and universal. The relationships that pass through the hospital room and through the mind of Vivian Bearing sometimes reaches an almost surreal level certainly an argument can be made that something of the Expressionist concept of drama sometimes seems to be playing out around that hospital bed.Įven the agency of Vivian’s encroaching meeting with mortality is as much metaphorical as it is a concrete reality. The dynamics of how personal distress conveys such larger universal truths through the complexity of interaction are, in fact, located far away from daily goings-on within hearth and home.
One of the most fascinating ways that Wit stands apart from the many other stage dramas in which the main character’s long, slow death provides the foundation for all narrative twists and turns to follow is that such family dynamics do not play a major role in the narrative.
These distressing personal issues are typically presented within the context of a play whose central theme radiates outward from the long, lingering death of its main character through interaction with a complex web of family members. Of the many themes explored in Margaret Edson’s play Wit, one of the most satisfying is the revelation by play’s end that regardless of how universal applicable all the other themes at play may be, the real engine driving all emotional and intellectual connections between almost inevitably results from distressing personal issues, often a particularly idiosyncratic dimension. We are thankful for their contributions and encourage you to make your own. These notes were contributed by members of the GradeSaver community.
0 kommentar(er)
