They also raise important questions about how healthcare professionals can learn to bear witness to the suffering of others. The lessons that Vivian learns about her own illness provide a useful dramatized study. Vivian comes to learn that it is only by embracing her own and others’ concrete humanity that she can find meaning in her journey of illness. In the play, English Professor Vivian Bearing comes to see that the abstract knowledge she gained from her studies of John Donne’s Holy Sonnets does not hold up in real-life matters of life and death.

One of the central themes around which W t revolves is the tension between theory and practice, between the abstract and the concrete, as it relates to such concepts as illness, suffering, and death. But to view W t merely as a defeatist play about death is to ignore the reality that it is also a revitalizing play about life, and that it contains crucial lessons for healthcare professionals about the “human” side of medicine. W t does, after all, tell the story of a woman’s arduous and ultimately unsuccessful battle with metastatic ovarian cancer. That the play has solicited strong reactions is not surprising. Moreover, when the play opened at Union Square Theatre in New York, producers were forced to hire psychologists to attend to the audience members who were too distraught to leave after the performance. She loosens the ties and the top gown slides to the floor.”Īmerican playwright Margaret Edson’s 1998 play W t has been described as “ninety minutes of suffering and death mitigated by a pelvic exam and a lecture on seventeenth-century poetry.” 1 When W t was first published, most theater companies rejected it on the grounds that its subject matter would be too difficult for audiences to bear.

Margaret Edson’s W t: lessons on person-centered care October 12, 2018

Wt by margaret edson