A Great Portrayal of a Harsh Reality

On Saturday, January 27th, I attended the play Wit that was put on at McManus Theatre by the Spotlight Players of Loyola College. This play took the audience along on a journey following Dr. Vivian Bearing’s battle with stage four ovarian cancer.
The play began with the main character, Dr. Bearing, coming out in a hospital gown, which she wore throughout the whole play. She told of how she deeply loved and obsessed over her work, the study of abstract poetry and most notably and foremost the study of the poet John Donne who lived from 1572-1631.
John Donne’s work has been the main focus of her life thus far. Fittingly, she teaches the most difficult and challenging class at Harvard University; abstract poetry. Throughout her struggle with ovarian cancer she relates to what has now become a very significant and relative poem by John Donne called Death Be Not Proud. One line in the poem was repeated many times, driving home its significance: “And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.”
Dr. Vivian Bearing comes off as a very hard-skinned women that does not appear to have many close friends and was never married. This was made evident in the play when she was first diagnosed with her cancer; only one person ever visited her, and that was right before her death.
The doctors working on Dr. Bearing’s case suggested a radical and experimental new treatment option for her. Other doctors had tried to undertake the new treatment but the patient always gave in to lesser treatment; this treatment is very prolonged and painful. However, Dr. Bearing decides that she will go through with the treatment and that she will not give up on any account. The treatment involves heavy cases of chemotherapy that will cause the Dr. to not only lose her hair and lose weight, but will cause her to be constantly fatigued and she will not be as sharp as she used to be during the treatment.
This play was extremely difficult for me to watch; I lost two close friends in high school to cancer. One of these friends died shortly after we moved up to ninth grade of a cancerous brain tumor and the other died a few weeks after I came to Loyola. In both instances, they had to undertake extremely painful and deteriorating chemotherapy that left them mere shadows of their former selves. Reliving the pain of watching someone slowly deteriorate into nothingness was difficult, yet the play was extremely accurate with it’s perception of how a person changes.
In the end of the play, Dr. Bearing’s cancer does not go away but instead it spreads to other parts of her body; she will die very soon after this. Knowing that she has no hope, she signs a “DNR” so that she will not have to go through more pain than she already has.
Watching the story of this Dr. who was so caught up in her work that it seemed she really never got a chance to live her life to the fullest reminded me of the situation my friends were in, however Dr. Bearing at least had fifty or so years to live. Watching her die alone, with no husband or children or even family besides her was a true tragedy. I believe the story of the play is to not get so caught up in work that you ignore what is truly important in life; you never know how much time you truly have left.