BY LUCIA MAURO
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Margaret Edson received the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Wit, her incisive drama that scales the summits of the mind and plunges to the depths of mortality. It entwines, with pointed humor, the physical and metaphysical worlds via a cancer-stricken university professor and the poetry of John Donne. Yet ask this unassuming writer if the award has changed her life, and she lets out a gentle laugh.
"It doesn’t really come up very much in the classroom," says Edson, 39, by telephone from her Atlanta home.
She is referring to her full-time career as a kindergarten teacher at a downtown Atlanta school. An educator for the past nine years, Edson has taught English as a second language in elementary schools in her native Washington, D.C. as well as recently focusing on developing and teaching literacy skills to children from non-reading families. She couldn’t be happier with what she considers her fairly unobtrusive life right now.
Three years ago, Edson moved to Atlanta, where her partner, Linda Merrill, took a position as curator of American art at the High Museum. The pair has a 9-month-old son, Timothy.
"[After the Pulitzer], I wasn’t looking for my life to change," she says. "But I made a lot of friends along the way. I truly like everything about teaching, including how aggravating it can be. It challenges every part of me. I’m happy with my life; and I enjoy working in my garden.
"I don’t have immediate plans to write another play. But, if something comes to me that I really have to say, I’ll write another play."
Wit–receiving its Chicago premiere at Goodman Theatre through June 16–is the one and only play (and only written work for that matter) Edson has ever penned. The fulfillment she has found in life seems to reflect the internal peace her lead character, Vivian Bearing, discovers too late when she is faced with a fatal disease. Edson began writing Wit in 1991, nearly six years after she worked as a unit clerk in a hospital oncology unit (one of the multifarious jobs she has held throughout her adventurous life).
Her path, which encompasses many character-shaping experiences, has not been a traditional one for a playwright–let alone a Pulitzer Prize winner. Edson talks about this unconventional journey with candor and self-effacement.
"I never set out to be a writer," she acknowledges. "I was not writing Wit toward any specific goal. I just wanted this story to be heard, and I felt I had to write it. One day, the character of Vivian Bearing walked into my mind with her backwards baseball cap and IV pole, and I knew that I needed to tell her story."
"Heard" is the operative word for Edson, who felt the oral scope of playwriting would most clearly convey her almost metaphoric account of a brilliant professor of 17th century English poetry, diagnosed with ovarian cancer, who must reevaluate her detachment from life and human kindness.
"I’m very interested in talk and the way people put their lives together speaking or listening," Edson explains. "I’m intrigued with the live breath of speech."
For her kindergarten classes, she includes a lot of singing exercises ("for language awareness") and approaches her teaching from an intensely analytical but accessible point of view.
"There’s a big difference between children who grow up in a reading family and those who do not," Edson contends. "The alphabetic code is transparent for children exposed to reading in their homes. But children from non-reading families do not understand the alphabet. For them, the alphabet is like Morse Code.
"The other students approach the alphabetic code as a written system of abstract symbols that represent the sound of speech, But we must help those children [from non-reading households] use speech as text. That’s why we sing a lot in class. Singing also promotes peaceful and energetic cooperation–everyone can do it at once."
Edson’s love of language and her belief in collaboration seemed a natural fit for the theatre. And although it might seem like a fluke that she snared a Pulitzer after a one-time crack at playwriting, the writer spent many years honing and shopping the script around. She wrote Wit over the course of a year before pursuing a masters degree in literature at Georgetown University.
"I didn’t have a master plan or any trajectory I was on," says Edson. "I felt reckless and free when I was writing because no one was expecting anything from me. But I had to do a ton of research on John Donne and cell biology. During my research, an image would pop into my mind completely clear."
When asked if she considers herself a natural writer, she contends that "listening is very natural as much as writing is natural." Then the playwright quips, "It sounds as easy as an evening of improv, but the process was lonely and grueling and required a lot of stamina."
She didn’t even have an agent when she sent her "absolute unsolicited manuscript" to two theatres, which rejected it outright.
But life moves on. So Edson shelved the play for a couple of years. She waited until 1995 to send the play’s synopsis and character list to 60 theatres around the country; only California’s South Coast Repertory Theater expressed an interest in seeing the rest of the manuscript. Here’s where the collaboration came in.
Edson credits South Coast Rep with helping to shape Wit and commends the company for bringing in its most experienced actors for the initial readings. The creative team stayed in tact from first reading to the fully staged world premiere.
"The real work was cutting," the writer says. "I worked very closely with South Coast Rep during the editing–about one-third was cut. And I argued against every syllable! Then during the last week of rehearsals, when I watched and listened to the play, I knew that those cuts were necessary."
From this experience, she learned to trust the director and performers. To this day, Edson is not one to sit in on a production and give the creative team notes. Besides, her young son and demanding teaching schedule prevent her from jetting around the country on a regular basis.
Despite South Coast Rep’s strong production, Wit was forced onto the back burner again. No other theatres seemed interested. By 1997, Edson was immersed in her teaching career. It wasn’t until an old school friend, director Derek Anson Jones ("after carrying the script around in his backpack for two years"), decided to stage Wit at New Haven’s Long Wharf Theater that the script was given another chance. That same year, Edson found an agent who had relentless faith in the play and was the driving force behind her Pulitzer Prize nomination.
At the end of the decade, Wit arrived off-Broadway at the 99-seat MCC Theater. In addition to the Pulitzer, her play earned more prestigious awards: Drama Desk, Dramatists Guild, Drama League of New York; New York Drama Critics Circle, Outer Critics Circle; and Los Angeles Drama Critics. She is particularly pleased that Wit has finally arrived in Chicago –"the theatre capital of the English-speaking world."
That’s quite a compliment coming from the scholarly playwright, who tied her brain in knots studying the metaphysical poetry of John Donne for Wit. Although terminal illness is the catalyst for the play’s main conflict, Edson insists that Wit is not about healthcare.
"It’s about grace in a higher, broader, deeper way," she says. "Vivian Bearing has done a lot, but if her life doesn’t address the issue of grace, then that’s a tragedy."
Edson felt the compulsively detailed Vivian Bearing and the anatomical English scribe John Donne were perfect for each other. She paid special attention to Donne’s Holy Sonnets.
"The Holy Sonnets were not written to provide spiritual insights and solace," she continues. "They were written as an intellectual game. Donne’s poems were not meant to be helpful; they were meant to be intriguing to other wits. They are explanations of a problem, which is salvation. This assembly and disassembly appeals to Vivian because all she has to be is clever and smart. She doesn’t have to feel anything–until, of course, she falls ill."
The open-minded Edson could not be more different than her tightly wound protagonist. Throughout her life, she has relished making connections with people. After graduating from Smith College with a degree in Renaissance history, Edson traveled across an eclectic terrain of employment.
She sold hot dogs on the street in Iowa City; waited tables at a hog-farmers’ bar; painted the walls of a French Dominican convent in Rome (where she learned plain chant and tutored children); worked as a physical therapy aide; sold bicycles; and raised funds for a community-based mental health organization addressing psychosocial aspects of HIV, where she wrote the training manual, "Living with AIDS: Perspectives for Caregivers."
Yet for all her prizes and experiences, Edson prefers intangibles and does not like to draw attention to herself.
"I’m attracted to teaching because I like that it’s invisible," says Edson. "I have nothing to show for it. By that, I mean I don’t know how my students will apply their knowledge or what direction their lives will take. It’s very mysterious, unpredictable and changeable. It’s like live theatre."