Creative Loafing Theater Critic Mark Leib loved the American Stage production of Wit, currently running through this Sunday on the Palladium main-stage. He gives the show a five-star rating – the highest he offers. He joins other critics, like John Fleming in raving about this show.
Tickets are available through American Stage or in the Palladium lobby before the show.
For the full review click on: http://cltampa.com/tampa/wit-is-beyond-words/Content?oid=3486104
Here are some excerpts.
Wit is a moving, harrowing, revelatory play about life and death, God and science, compassion and cruelty. As we watch English professor Dr. Vivian Bearing confront a painful cancer and its even more painful treatment, we are drawn to reflect on our own lives, uncertain as they are, and the edifices we have built against time and tragedy. Though the play is too complex to be reduced to a single meaning, its most central teaching seems to be that there is nothing more essential than human kindness, no quality more urgent, no acquirement more indispensable….
…If great art is the art that combines beauty and depth, Wit is great art.
…The American Stage production at The Palladium does it justice. Kim Crow as Vivian Bearing is strong and sarcastic when the going is good, stunned and less caustic when the going gets rough, and then terribly needy as death approaches and her pain reaches levels she never thought possible.
Crow is also very funny from time to time, and even arrogant when the subject is her appreciation of Donne. As the doctor and former student who has the most contact with her in the hospital, Bill Grennan has a Tom Hanks likability: Even with his utter insensitivity to his patient’s humanity, he’s just the boy-next-door who happens to find cancer fascinating, as he must have found astronomy or evolution fascinating in years past.
Joe Parra is tellingly clumsy and clueless as Dr. Harvey Kelekian, the first M.D. to diagnose Bearing and recommend her cycles of treatment; he seems to find human weakness embarrassing, like a poorly covered blemish. And as Nurse Monahan, the one with a heart, LuLu Picart is endearing without ever seeming emblematic. One imagines that she simply treats all her patients with the same affection.
Todd Olson’s direction is impeccable, and Scott Cooper’s set, mostly made up of curtains and a few pieces of furniture, is as coldly sensible as any hospital interior I’ve ever seen. Cooper also designed Bearing’s hospital gown and the other costumes.
Should you see Wit in spite of the fearsomeness of its subject? Absolutely. This is drama that can change, or at least redirect, your life. As Donne elsewhere remarks, this bell tolls for all of us. If an inspired work of art can remind us of that fact, we need it in our repertoire.
Few plays are as important. See it if you can.
For more details: www.mypalladium.org
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