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City Theatre Tackles Cancer

Updated: Tuesday, March 6 2012, 01:41 AM CST
By Rob Faubion, Austin On Stage - www.austinonstage.com

The City Theatre Company will stage Margaret Edson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Wit, running March 15 through April 8.  Written by Margaret Edson, the life-affirming play follows a brilliant and exacting poetry professor as she embarks on a bold journey to save her life, battling a deadly disease which affects 8 million people worldwide and takes the lives of over 500,000 Americans each year.
  
A magna cum laude graduate in Renaissance History and English, Edson worked in a myriad of jobs - ranging from waitress to selling bicycles to clerking in a cancer and AIDS ward - before she picked up her pen and wrote her first play, Wit, while teaching in DC public schools. The play received its first production in 1995, premiered in New York in 1998 - receiving universal acclaim - and won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The play also won the Drama Desk and Dramatists Guild Award, Drama Desk of New York and New York Drama Critics Circle Award, Outer Critics Circle and Los Angeles Drama Critics awards.  Edson currently teaches kindergarten in Atlanta, GA.
    
Wit tells the story of Vivian Bearing, a renowned but uncompromising English professor who has spent years teaching the brilliant and difficult metaphysical sonnets of John Donne.  Diagnosed with terminal ovarian cancer, she becomes a prize patient in an experimental chemotherapy program at a major teaching hospital - and comes to reassess her life and her work with a grace and humor that are transformative both for her and the audience.
    
Heading the cast is actress and real-life professor Dr. Judith Laird, who holds a Ph.D. in English and is on the faculty at Texas State University.  The message of the play has been especially important to her.
    
“The message is all about hope, she said. "My mother died of cancer and, though, such a difficult experience, the important part is to see the journey of our lives and to accept where those journeys have taken us.”
    
The cast also features Vanessa Marie, Kristen Bennett, Clay Avery, Craig Kanne, Mario Silva, Barbara Weems and Paul Mahaffey.  Jeff Hinkle - whose past productions at City Theatre include Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, This Spring of Love and the B. Iden Payne Award-nominated Cat on a Hot Tin Roof - directs the production.
     
The cast and crew said they hope the production will bring awareness to the fight against cancer, and a “Wall of Hope” will be available at the theatre for audience members to sign in honor and memory of loved ones who have battled cancer.  Signatures and messages will also be collected online at the Wit Facebook event page.
    
Performances will run Thursday through Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 5:30 p.m.  Tickets are $25 guaranteed front or second row reserved seating, $15 for general admission, and $12 for students. All seats for the Thursday performances are $10.

The City Theatre is located at 3823 Airport Blvd. on the east corner of Airport Blvd. and 38 ½ Street.   

For reservations and more information, call (512) 524-2870 or visit www.CityTheatreAustin.org.

(Photo Credit Andy Berkovsky)
City Theatre Tackles Cancer