W;t
A Play by Margaret Edson
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize
March 5-27, 2010 at the Empire Theatre, Santa Ana
In this extraordinary play, Margaret Edson has created a work that is as intellectually challenging as it is emotionally immediate. Vivian Bearing, Ph.D., a renowned professor of English who has spent years studying and teaching the brilliantly difficult Holy Sonnets of the metaphysical poet John Donne, has been diagnosed with terminal cancer. Her approach to her illness is not unlike her approach to the study of Donne: aggressively probing and intensely rational. But during the course of her illness—and her stint as a patient in an experimental chemotherapy program at a major teaching hospital—Vivian comes to reassess her life and her work with a profundity and humor that are transformative both for her and for the audience.
“[A] brutally human and beautifully layered new play. . .You will feel both enlightened and, in a strange way, enormously comforted.”
The New York Times
“A dazzling and humane play you will remember till your dying day.”
New York Magazine
“You feel that its lessons and pleasures amount to a second chance, to an amazing grace.”
The New Yorker
Featuring: Sonja Berggren as Vivian Bearing, with Brandon Crisler, Carmen Guo, Darcy Porter, Pete Taylor, Nick Wopershall and Karen Wray
March 5 – 27, 2010, Fridays and Saturdays at 8pm;
Sunday, March 14 and 21 at 2pm; Thursday, March 25 at 8pm
The Empire Theatre, 202 N. Broadway, Santa Ana, CA 92701
$20 regular admission; $15 senior/student, $25 opening gala
contains brief nudity
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