Margaret Edson
Inside Out

June 13 - 19 

“Maggie Edson's script (for her play Wit) rings true, because it is true. . . . -- terrifying, raucously funny, illuminating, transfiguring. . . . To breathe her [Vivian Bearning – central character of the play] words was the most incredible process of personal deconstruction. A process that was ultimately fulfilled by an awakening, powerful grace and a profound sense of gratitude. A process that was shared by everyone in the theatre, time after time. Playing this role has meant more to me than I can ever say -- a blessing beyond measure.” – Kim Cross, actor

When Maggie Edson won the Pulitzer Prize for Wit, some of the headlines proclaimed “the first kindergarten teacher to win.” Well, why not? The best teachers are filled with empathy, skilled at listening and building relationships, and communicate clearly and effectively – important abilities for great writers. Certainly not all great teachers are great writers – and vice-versa. But Maggie Edson is both.

It is a great privilege to have Maggie come to offer a session at the Ranch. If you have any questions about who she is and whether you will enjoy the session while learning a lot, I recommend looking at the following:

Enjoy Maggie Edson’s Commencement Address at Smith College; go to www.vimeo.com/1085942. Her wisdom and humor combine into a wonderful tribute to classroom teaching.

Enter into the world of Vivian Bearing by viewing Wit; the Emmy Award HBO version starring Emma Thompson is available through Netflix and other sources.

To see an interview with Maggie Edson about her play Wit, go to www.charlierose.com

I have included an article about Wit and Maggie Edson (see below). This will be a wonderful week of storytelling and pondering and, if the stories about her are true, we’ll probably do a good deal of singing and laughing. This is the kind of renewal we can all appreciate.
– Carl Koch, Director

November 12, 1998
Leisure & Arts
In Kindergarten with Author of 'Wit'
By AMY GAMERMAN
Atlanta

Maggie Edson -- the celebrated playwright who is so far off-Broadway, she's below the Mason-Dixon line -- is performing a daily ritual known as Wiggle Down.

"Tapping my toe, just tapping my toe" she sings, to the tune of "Singin' in the Rain," before a crowd of kindergarteners at Centennial Place, a downtown elementary school here. "What a glorious feeling, I'm -- nodding my head!" The kids gleefully tap their toes and nod themselves silly as they sing along.

"Give yourselves a standing O!" Ms. Edson cries, when the song ends. Her charges scramble to their feet and clap their hands, sending their arms arcing overhead in a giant "O."

This willowy 37-year-old woman with tousled brown hair and a big grin couldn't seem more different from Dr. Vivian Bearing, the brilliant, emotionally remote English professor who is the heroine of her play "Wit" -- which has won such unanimous critical acclaim in its small off-Broadway production that plans are brewing right now to move it to Broadway.

Vivian (beautifully played by Kathleen Chalfant) is a 50-year-old scholar who has devoted her life to the study of John Donne's "Holy Sonnets." When we meet her, she is dying of ovarian cancer. Bald from chemotherapy, she makes her entrance clad in a hospital gown, dragging an IV pole. "It is not my intention to give away the plot," Vivian tells the audience, "but I think I die at the end."

In this fierce, funny and unforgettable play, the uncompromising scholar becomes herself an object of study, as her doctors put her through a grueling course of experimental treatments. In scenes in the hospital and flashbacks to her past, we watch wry, caustic Vivian struggle with her ultimate lesson: how to face her own death. "I know all about life and death," she tells us. "I am, after all, a scholar of Donne's 'Holy Sonnets,' which explore mortality in greater depth than any other body of work in the English language." It is one of "Wit's" triumphs that Vivian makes us see exactly what she means. Caught in this play's powerful searchlight, poems such as "Death be not proud" spring to life -- with the very placement of a comma crystallizing mysteries of life and death for Vivian and her audience. For this feat, one critic demanded that Ms. Edson be handed the Harvard English department.

But she'd never take it. Kindergarten is where the action is.

"Learning to read -- that's the biggest thing you learn in your whole life," she says over dinner after a long day of teaching and lesson-planning. "Alphabet letters represent sound, text maps speech -- once you learn that, that's the hardest thing. It's the thing that opens your mind the most, that gives you the most power."

Ms. Edson -- Miss Edson, to her students -- grew up in Washington, D.C., and studied history at Smith College in Northampton, Mass. After graduation, she worked in an Iowa bar pouring drinks for hog farmers, then spent a year living in a Dominican convent in Rome. Back home in Washington, she got a job in the oncology/AIDS unit of a research hospital in 1985. "I was a unit clerk, which is a very low level job -- scheduling appointments, keeping supplies going," she says. "Because it was very low level, I got to see everything."

She left after a year, but the experience haunted her. So in January 1991, Ms. Edson quit her job at a mental health organization to write a play inspired by her time in the cancer unit. Why? "Because I wanted to go see it," she says simply, "and I thought someone has to write it."

She had less than a year. The following fall, Ms. Edson was to begin a master's degree in literature at Georgetown University -- the kick-off, presumably, to an academic career. As she began work on her play, she started thinking that maybe her heroine would be an academic, too. "I wanted to write about someone who would lose their power. I saw that in the hospital. You build up a certain set of tools. What happens to you if those tools don't serve you anymore?"

Ms. Edson decided to make Vivian a specialist in the poems of John Donne, for the simple reason that she'd always heard that they were the most demanding in English literature. Not that she had read any of them: Her own formal studies of poetry were limited to one college course -- "a very good class, but I don't think I read any John Donne." So she hit the library. "If you know how to study something, you can study anything," she explains.

But her first reading of Donne baffled her. "The harder I worked, I didn't get an answer," she says. "Some of these poems are too complicated. What's the point if they don't flow as poems?" She began "a pretty comprehensive study," which eventually led her to an understanding that "Donne is being suspicious of simplicity" -- much like Vivian herself.

Maggie Edson continued:

At the same time, she delved into medical texts on cancer, both at the public library and at the National Library of Medicine. The more she read, the more she was struck by the unlikely correspondences between poetry and medicine -- correspondences that are used to great effect in "Wit." "When you really study a poem, you anatomize it," Ms. Edson says. "You can't make that up."

Ms. Edson finished "Wit" on schedule and sent it out to two theaters -- both of which promptly rejected it. She put her play away and began her master's program. "The idea was, I would fall in love with it and do a Ph.D.," she says. "That didn't happen." Instead, she discovered her life's work off-campus, when she began tutoring a young boy from the Dominican Republic in English through a volunteer program at her church. After she finished her degree, she took a job at a Washington elementary school.

That year, she sent "Wit" out to a new batch of theaters. In 1995, "Wit" was produced by California's South Coast Repertory theater, then in 1997, at New Haven's Long Wharf Theater -- under the direction of her childhood pal, Derek Anson Jones (he played Vivian at the very first reading of "Wit" around Ms. Edson's mom's kitchen table). By the time the play made it to New York's tiny MCC Theater this fall, Ms. Edson had moved to Atlanta, where her partner Linda Merrill had accepted a curatorial post at the High Museum.

On opening night, she caught a flight to New York after a long day of teaching and administrative meetings and reached the theater just before the play ended. "I was there changing in the restroom as everyone was coming out," she recalls. "This woman was in the next stall crying and blowing her nose." The following Monday, she was back in kindergarten.

Her day begins at 7:00 a.m., when she and her co-teacher, Sandra Reid, prepare for their class of 24 children, most from the inner city and many from what are termed "print-poor" homes. "The best hope these kids have is if they learn to read by the third grade," says Ms. Edson. Her classroom is bright and cheerful, with alphabet letters on the walls, a terrarium, a clutch of computers and low-to-the-ground work tables with tiny chairs.

From the moment the five-year-olds come in at 8 until they break for lunch at 11:30, the classroom's primary colors blur with activity. Ms. Edson and Ms. Reid lead their charges through math exercises (they count up to today's date), a reading lesson, a science project (planting seeds in plastic cups of dirt), and lots and lots of songs -- many of them penned by Ms. Edson herself. "We sing a lot in our class," she explained. "Singing is really good for language awareness." The children also work on their journals, drawing pictures of themselves and their families and copying out simple phrases about them.

Nothing escapes Ms. Edson's eye. Troublemakers -- "I have six boys ready to get in a fist fight at any time" -- are taken aside and spoken to quietly. Another little boy is singled out for praise. "He needed a purple crayon to do his drawing, and so he said, 'May I please get a purple crayon?' What do you think class, thumbs up or thumbs down?" The class gives him a unanimous thumbs up. The contrast between Ms. Edson and the implacable Vivian -- who in one scene, stonily refuses to grant an extension to a student whose grandmother has died -- couldn't be more dramatic.

But then, Ms. Edson isn't quite sure that she likes Vivian. "I'm not saying smart is bad," she says slowly. "Smart is not bad -- but kind is good."

From Kim Crow who performed role of Vivian Bearing

Throughout my professional life I've wondered at various times, in various degrees: 'Am I reaching someone through my work? Am I touching anyone's life in a meaningful manner as an actor, as Artaud so gently put it, as an 'athlete of the heart'? What is this ephemeral theatrical experience, this collective hallucination of humanity we share? Am I a true instrument in conveying the playwright's message? Am I serving my director's vision? Does my work convey the joy I feel as a performing artist? Do my efforts in this creative collaboration help the play to resonate properly? Have I done my utmost to serve my ensemble and the process? Have I truly honored the work and the people who do it ? Have I done my best? Have I told the truth?'

Maggie Edson's script rings true, because it is true. The shared theatrical experience can be an electric touchstone for both the actor and the audience -- terrifying, raucously funny, illuminating, transfiguring. I knew I had do it from the moment I read it, somewhere, some way. To tell this story became a passionate, privileged pilgrimage. I know this woman and to breathe her words was the most incredible process of personal deconstruction. A process that was ultimately fulfilled by an awakening, powerful grace and a profound sense of gratitude. A process that was shared by everyone in the theatre, time after time. Playing this role has meant more to me than I can ever say -- a blessing beyond measure.

I think that the Florida Rep production resonated so in our audience's hearts because everyone involved - consummate professionals all - gave fully from their hearts their very best efforts to unblinkingly tell the truth. And so we were all Blessed.

HOLY SONNETS.
by John Donne
X.

Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;
For those, whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow,
Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleep, which but thy picture[s] be,
Much pleasure, then from thee much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee do go,
Rest of their bones, and soul's delivery.
Thou'rt slave to Fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell,
And poppy, or charms can make us sleep as well,
And better than thy stroke; why swell'st thou then?
One short sleep past, we wake eternally,
And Death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.