04/14/2001

By Tom Mayo

Wit – the Pulitzer-Prize winning surprise hit of the 1999 New York theater season – runs throughout this month at the Dallas Theater Center. It is a play that I have been teaching for three years in a class for medical and law students called "Law, Literature and Medicine." It is an important play for professionals (and students) to experience for many reasons. In addition to being great theater, Wit is something of a cultural milestone, a breakthrough event in our ongoing attempts to understand and refashion the American Way of Death.

Exactly 20 years before Wit won the Pulitzer Prize, another play about the death of a hospital patient crossed the Atlantic from the London stage and was the most celebrated play of the 1979 Broadway season. Whose Life Is It, Anyway? explored – with fierce humor and a star turn by the bed-ridden Tom Conti – the demand of Ken Harrison, a recently paralyzed sculptor, that his hospital treatments be stopped and that he be allowed to die. The play was a power struggle between an eloquent and headstrong patient and a medical establishment that regarded its most basic duty to be the preservation of life, whether or not the quality of that life was acceptable to the patient himself.

In some ways, the play captured the essence of the newly christened "right to die" movement of the time. Courts and legislators were just beginning to establish that competent patients have the right to refuse even life-sustaining treatments and to write the ground rules for surrogate decision-makers who try to make those decisions on behalf of incompetent patients unable to speak for themselves.

A generation later, despite occasional lapses in practice, the ethical and legal principles that were fought out in Whose Life? are well settled. The questions explored by Wit are much more subtle and, for modern audiences, much more compelling. In the space of a cancer patient's last few hours and through flashbacks spanning nearly 50 years, we see a university professor (and specialist in the Holy Sonnets of John Donne) who always has assumed that intellect, discipline and professional achievement will be enough to get her through life. Maybe, but will they get her through death? For the rest of us, it asks: How have we prepared for our own deaths?

What Wit offers is the story of the last months and hours of a cancer patient's life through her eyes, against the backdrop of her memories and life choices, and her experiences with the good and the bad of modern hospital care. That is the perspective – the patient's and client's perspective – that the medical and law students in my class will need to remember and to honor if the "learned professions" are going to earn and keep the trust of the public we are trained and licensed to serve.

Ultimately, that also may be why this play has touched so many people in such a deep and personal way – physicians, cancer survivors, families, local chapters of Gilda's Club (including the North Texas chapter, scheduled to open in May) and many others. At its core, Wit presents a humane, patient-centered message about the contradictions and absurdities of modern-day, institutionalized death, as well as the opportunities for meaning, grace and love.

Those are challenging topics to consider in a night at the theater, and Wit sets the bar at a high level for its audience. It offers up some of the harsher realities of death and dying in a hospital. Some of Wit's scenes are harrowing, but they are leavened by many moments of tenderness and humor. And although the visual and aural impact of those scenes shouldn't be underestimated, a large part of Wit's appeal stems from the fact that the play isn't simply constructed of language: It also is about language.

The play requires us to pay close attention to the words of John Donne's poetry and even the minutest detail of punctuation. (The marquee version of the title – "W;t" – is most certainly not a typo!) In the end, the redemptive power of human caring is expressed, in a most elemental way, through language. It is a moment of almost inexpressible power and beauty that shouldn't be missed.

Tom Mayo teaches law at Southern Methodist University and is an adjunct professor of internal medicine at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School.