photo by Ann States/SABA

Margaret Edson (G’92) wrote her first play in 1991 – an intellectually and emotionally complex drama that won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize. "W;t" is about an English professor who has spent years studying the Holy Sonnets of John Donne and is now facing terminal ovarian cancer. The New York Times called the play "brutally human and beautifully layered." Newsday called it "exhilarating and harrowing." In fact, all the reviews of the play were overwhelmingly flattering.

But Edson doesn’t believe she will necessarily ever write another play. Her time is now spent in a classroom with undersized chairs, saying kindly but firmly, "Sit down," "A is for Apple," and "What sound does the letter ‘M’ make?"

This is because Edson, 37, is first and foremost a kindergarten teacher. She loves being a kindergarten teacher, and has no plans whatsoever to stop being a kindergarten teacher. When ABC’s "World News Tonight" heard about the Pulitzer and sent a camera crew to her school, Centennial Place Elementary in Atlanta, the producer doggedly pressed Edson about why she was a teacher.

"Finally, I blurted out, ‘because these children are going to change the world,’ " she says. The newsman backed off.

That night the New York City cast and crew of "W;t" assembled for the first time since the Pulitzer announcement, watched the news segment on Edson, and gathered for a toast. One of the play’s executive directors, Bernard Telsey, held up a glass and said, "To the children who are going to change the world."

Edson changed the world a bit with her words – simply because she felt she had something to say. She’s said it now, and that’s that.

At the time Edson started writing, a friend of hers was building a tool shed in his back yard. "He was building a shed. That was him," she explains. "I was writing a play. That was me."

Edson lives on a quiet street in the comfortable Virginia-Highland neighborhood of Atlanta. In midsummer, she had just moved into a new house, and was happy to have an interviewer sit on her porch for a few hours. Over a couple of glasses of Pellegrino and soft French cheese, she talked about her life and what some view as one of the better plays of the decade.

Almost any description of "W;t" (the semi-colon relates to a line in the play) is itself painfully insufficient, and that is what makes it so brilliant. At first blush, though, its concept sounds either trite or grossly depressing.

This is mostly why it took the play so long to see the stage.

"It was a hard sell," Edson admits. "I know that’s hard to understand now, but the reactions were, ‘Too much talking, too sad, too intellectual.’ "

Vivian Bearing, the play’s protagonist, is someone most people have known or been – a driven, methodical intellectual who can figure out everything but her own mortality. The young doctor who treats her is a former student, rigorously trained in her own brutal method of analysis. He practices precision, with little or no regard for the humanity behind the medical words that describe her advancing cancer. It is Vivian herself who has created the monster who carefully ticks off the symptoms and signposts of her impending death, callously reminding himself out loud, in front of her, to be more compassionate. In the course of the play, Vivian comes to grips with the insufficiency of wit, words, and intellect in the face of her own impending death.

But Edson says her characters never say outright what she says is the central message of her play.

"If I had done that, the play really never would have been produced," she says teasingly, begging the question.

So?

"Love one another," she says.

After she wrote "W;t," Edson sent it to a theater. It was rejected. She couldn’t get an agent. She shelved the play, physically and mentally, for her year at Georgetown.

"I decided to wait until I wasn’t so exposed," she says.

Finally, she worked up the courage to send it around to several theaters. It was rejected – repeatedly. Then things snowballed. It was picked up in 1995 by the South Coast Repertory Theater in Southern California. The director, Martin Benson, cut the play by a third. Once it got underway, "W;t" had an extended run. It swept the L.A. Drama Critics Awards.

Meanwhile, a high school friend of Edson’s, Derek Anson Jones, had been carrying her play around in his backpack. At the time, Anson Jones was assisting Doug Hughes in a production of Shakespeare’s "Henry V" in Central Park starring Kathleen Chalfant, a veteran off-Broadway actress. Eventually, Anson Jones showed the play to both Hughes and Chalfant, who found it intriguing.

In November of 1997, Anson Jones convinced Hughes to let him direct "W;t" at the Long Wharf Theater in Connecticut. Chalfant had agreed to play Vivian. In 1998, it opened in New York at MCC Theater. A year later, the play was moved to the Union Square Theater.

As is customary, "W;t" was nominated for a Pulitzer along with seemingly every other play in New York. The difference was that, at least in this case, "W;t" won.

Edson comes across as a woman with a fierce but disciplined mind, not so unlike her play’s Vivian. She is eager to please, and at the same time, hard to impress.

But you want to impress her. This woman, this teacher, wrote a hit play. You want to make sure she knows you read the play, but more importantly, that you understood it.

"Something that comes across very clearly in the play is this whole idea of hiding behind wit," you venture.

"Good for you," she says, and you sit there, content with yourself, understanding how her students feel when she says, probably, the very same phrase, about putting all the crayons away.

At her innermost core, Margaret Edson is a teacher. She is not a playwright, even though she wrote a hit play.

"I don’t think she ever thought of herself as a writer with a capital ‘W,’ " says Georgetown English professor Norma Tilden, with whom Edson team-taught during her fellowship at Georgetown’s Writing Center. "If you have to put her in a box, she’s a teacher. And through the playwriting, well, she’s reached a lot of people that way."

A native of Washington, D.C., Edson graduated from Smith College in 1983 with a degree in history. In the following two years, she worked as a waitress in Iowa, then as a worker at a Dominican convent in Rome. When she returned to D.C. in 1985, she worked as a hospital orderly, a clerk in a cancer research unit (where the inklings of "W;t" were born), a nonprofit policy organization, a community-based mental health nonprofit, and finally, a bicycle shop.

One day in the early 1990s, Edson decided she wanted to write a play. She went about it as methodically as her main character studies Donne. She rented an apartment above Georgetown Hairstyling on 35th Street, across the street from Sugar’s. She researched Donne’s "Holy Sonnets." She wrote in her apartment every morning, then headed to work at the bicycle shop. It was, she admits, a delicious daily dichotomy.

"Working on the play was very lonely," she says. "Working at the bike shop was hanging out with 14-year-old boys. And when I stopped writing for the day, I didn’t think about it."

This is hard to imagine. The play’s prose is relentlessly intense. In a key point in the play (below), which accounts for its semi-colon instead of an "i" in "W;t," Vivian flashes back to her days in graduate school and a confrontation with her professor, E. M. Ashford.

Ashford has just told Vivian that her essay on Donne’s "Holy Sonnet Six" is a "melodrama" with "hysterical punctu-ation." She argues that the middle of Donne’s line, "And death shall be no more, Death thou shalt die" should be separated by a comma, not a semicolon, and should not include any exclamation points, as the young Vivian had transcribed it in her essay:

E.M.: Nothing but a breath - a comma - separates life from life everlasting. It is very simple really. With the original punctuation restored, death is no longer something to act out on a stage, with exclamation points. It’s a comma, a pause. This way, the uncompromising way, one learns something from this poem, wouldn’t you say? Life, death. Soul, God. Past, present. Not insuperable barriers, not semicolons, just a comma.

VIVIAN: Life, death … I see. (Standing) It’s a metaphysical conceit. It’s wit! I’ll go back to the library and rewrite the paper —

photo by Joan Marcus

E.M.: (Standing, emphatically) It is not wit, Miss Bearing. It is truth. (Walking around the desk to her) The paper’s not the point.

VIVIAN: It isn’t?

E.M.: (Tenderly) Vivian. You’re a bright young woman. Use your intelligence. Don’t go back to the library. Go out. Enjoy yourself with your friends. Hmm?

(VIVIAN walks away. E.M. slides off.)

Edson has always been fascinated by the interplay between written and oral culture, between language and what it expresses. During the year that she taught with Tilden, Edson burst into the professor’s office one day, flush with excitement over a text she’d just read. Edson was smitten with a single line written by a Jesuit professor at St. Louis University named Walter Ong, who has written on the connection between written and oral culture.

"She’d been reading Ong, and she came in and said, ‘Literacy is the seedbed of irony.’ And I was waiting for the rest," Tilden recalls. "But she had touched on something that was very interesting to her. … It’s about how insufficient it finally is to live in a world of wit."

In a way, going back to her kindergartners is Edson’s way of acknowledging how insufficient it was for her to live in a world of wit, as well as the world surrounding "W;t."

Edson finished the play shortly after she began working as a teaching assistant in Georgetown’s Writing Center. She walked down to Kinko’s on M Street to print it out and make a copy. Then she opened a gift from a friend, a Goldenberg’s Peanut Chew candy bar, to be eaten only when the play was completed. Walking out onto M, savoring the candy, she ran into a student in one of her Georgetown classes. She offered her a piece.

That moment, when she shared the candy bar that represented a year of work, seems to be a flashpoint in Margaret Edson’s life. One door closed and another opened. Margaret Edson, erstwhile playwright, became Margaret Edson, past, present and future teacher.

The Kennedy Center will stage a production of "W;t" in the spring. Edson recently agreed to speak on campus on Jan. 21, 2000, as part of 10th anniversary celebrations of the Georgetown Women’s Center.

At Georgetown in the early 1990s, Edson discovered she loved to teach, but also that she "didn’t want to spend the rest of her life in the Academy." A simultaneous stint teaching English as a Second Language through her church led to a job in the D.C. public school system, where she taught first grade. In the summer of 1998, she moved to Atlanta with Linda Merrill, curator of American art at Atlanta’s High Museum of Art.

When an Atlanta elementary school-teacher won the Pulitzer Prize for drama, journalists had a ball. What luck that this year’s most celebrated playwright was not among the usual suspects, not a member of the set that, at least stereotypically, lives an elite existence.

As the Pulitzer chaos enveloped Centennial Place Elementary, Edson spoke calmly with her students. "I wrote a play that’s in New York and I won a prize for it," she told the assembled 5- and 6-year-olds. "But I don’t want to be in New York. I want to be here with you, because you all are so smart and you work so hard."

They continued with the day’s work, which included learning several songs. One student went home and told his father that "Ms. Edson won a big prize for writing the song about the lady who swallowed the fly."

It was as it should be, in the world according to Margaret Edson. She isn’t hiding behind "W;t." There were no rounds of expensive champagne when she won the Pulitzer, or even a fancy dinner. She went for pizza at a local joint in the neighborhood. Afterward, she made her way to Zesto’s, a well-known Atlanta soft-serve ice cream shop that she’d been dying to visit ever since she arrived in the city in August of 1998. She ordered vanilla-chocolate swirl.

"It was the best ice cream cone I’ve ever had," she says.

"I’m very amused by all these people who say they’re going to force her into writing another play," Tilden says. "I know how futile those efforts really are…I’m convinced that she will do something else. She might decide to draw a comic strip, and she would do that very well."