American Drama in the Age of Film

11. Cancer and the Classroom

11 Cancer and the Classroom I take it that the intent of science is to ease human existence. —Bertolt Brecht, Galileo Ernest Lehman, the producer of the film adaptation of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ? also took credit for the screenplay of Albee’s play, although the playwright contended that the script was all his and that Lehman added only one line!1 Similarly, the HBO Films production of Wit (2001) gives director Mike Nichols and his star, Emma Thompson, a screenplay credit even though the film adheres closely to Margaret Edson’s Pulitzer Prize–winning play. Claiming that the film is “based on the play by Margaret Edson” sounds a little absurd when the words belong almost entirely to the playwright. Still, using essentially the same text, the film does things quite differently than the stage play. Reviewing the play in New York at the ninety-nine-seat MCC Theatre in Chelsea, critic Peter Marks said, “it’s as if we are sitting in Vivian’s hospital room, sharing her trials rather than merely witnessing them.” Marks’s bias presumes that intimacy is better than distance, but a narrative lecture-hall presentation is the operating conceit in Edson’s play, and highly theatrical techniques actually make a large space a preferable venue for performance. Her play keeps the viewer from getting too close to the action, and the spatial separation produces tension but also allows the drama room to breathe and resonate. If intimacy were the only virtue of Wit, then Mike Nichols’s television adaptation would be far superior to any possible stage production. His film traipses on the borders of intimacy and invasiveness in ways that thematically distinguish the film from the play. The story and subject matter of Edson’s play might, at first glance, seem to relegate it to the intimacies of the small stage. An English professor of seventeenthcentury literature, a not particularly pleasant woman, undergoes eight months of intensive chemotherapy to combat advanced metastatic ovarian cancer and dies, predictably and rather undramatically, at the end. All theaters big and small throughout the land initially rejected the play as too much of a “downer.” Edson wrote her play in 1991, but it was not produced until South Coast Repertory staged it in California in early 1995. Who wants to see a play about can- Cancer and the Classroom / 145 cer? Most AIDS plays (such as The Normal Heart, As Is, The Baltimore Waltz, even Angels in America) trade on hysteria, homophobia, moral outrage, discrimination , victimization, and protest. How young! How unfair! How tragic! Cancer carries none of that sexiness, and, interpolating from Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor, there’s even a sense that cranky Professor Bearing, fifty, deserves the deadly disease she gets. At best she is, as she says early in the play, “an unwitting accomplice” (8), and that does not suggest compelling drama. Sontag contrasts the theatrical nature of TB with the prosaic insidiousness of cancer. The former disease manifests its symptoms externally through fever, flushed cheeks, and the telltale cough. Therefore this disease, like AIDS, lends itself readily to dramatic representations. There’s no better death scene than Greta Garbo’s in Camille, George Cukor’s 1936 tearjerker adapted from La Dame aux camélias, a mid-nineteenth-century novel/play by Alexandre Dumas fils, when the heroine embraces her lover for the last time. No such death scene suits Professor Bearing in Wit. The disease destroys the internal organs and makes no explicit show. When Dr. Posner gives Professor Bearing a pelvic exam, the audience discovers the “size” of the problem by gauging the doctor’s physical reactions upon discovering the mass of the tumor inside her. “Jesus” is all he says, and he “tries for composure” before leaving quickly, leading the audience to infer that the tumor is very large (27). Still, there’s nothing for the actress to do to convey that she’s extremely sick. Halfway through the play, she confides to the audience, “I just hold still and look cancerous. It requires less acting every time” (32). The irony, Professor Bearing recognizes, is that the treatment to combat her disease, an experimental concoction of hexaminaphosphacil mixed with vinplatin, is what makes her physically ill. The chemotherapeutic agents kill all her reproducing cells and therefore cause her to vomit and lose appetite and precipitate hair loss. The cure, not the cancer, causes her to look “sick.” Cancer is nothing spectacular, but seventeenth-century metaphysical...