For those of you who plan to attend the reading of Margaret Edson's
Pulitzer Prize-winning play, "Wit" this afternoon, you may enjoy this
interview w/her which appeared last fall in the New York Times.  (Actually,
those of you who are unable to attend will enjoy it as well!)  The reading
will be done by the Chattanooga Theatre Centre and will take place in the
UTC Fine Arts Center from 2:15 p.m. - 4:15 p.m. as part of the Southern
Writer's Conference.  There is no admission/registration.

              November 10, 1998


              Margaret Edson: Colors, Numbers, Letters and
              John Donne

              By KEVIN SACK

ATLANTA, Nov. 9 -- The lunch menu at Centennial Place Elementary School on
Thursday included square slices of cheesy pizza, a lettuce-only salad,
syrupy fruit cocktail and corn. And so it was not entirely unexpected when
corn kernels began to fly shortly after the two dozen members of Margaret
Edson's kindergarten class took their seats at a long cafeteria table. Some
of the projectiles were lobbed by hand by kindergartners at a neighboring
table. Others were fired with slingshot force of a plastic fork.
        "This is my world," Edson explained, surveying her troops.
Actually, it is only part of her world, although she is determined to
prevent the two halves from commingling. Seven years ago, while working as
a sales clerk at a Washington bicycle shop, Edson wrote a first play called
"Wit," aboutthe agonizing death and journey to grace of a cancer-stricken
professor of 17th-century English poetry. In September, after performances
in Costa Mesa, Calif., and New Haven, the play moved to the 99-seat MCC
Theater in Manhattan and quickly became one of the most critically
acclaimed works of the season.
 The New York production has been commended for the unsparing portrayal of
Prof.Vivian Bearing by Kathleen Chalfant and for the attentive direction of
Derek Anson Jones, a high school classmate of Edson's. But much of the
highest praise has been reserved for the rookie playwright, who was
described in a review in The New York Times as "a lover of mind-expanding
irony" who is capable of finding "poetry in the reading of a sonogram and
science in the deconstruction of a sonnet."
        Edson, 37, is tickled by the success of "Wit," but her teaching
duties at a new urban school have allowed little time for
self-congratulation. She likes it that way. Few of her fellow teachers know
about the play. She told only her principal because she had to explain
that she needed to miss school one day so she could go see a performance.
"I just don't need to bring it up," she said in an interview in her
brightly decorated classroom after her pupils had left for the day. "I
mean, I'm doing what I'm doing. I'm engrossed in it. I'm very excited in my
heart about the play, but it's not relevant to going through the day."
The paradoxes are transparent, of course. A heralded playwright whose work
explores the revelations hidden within John Donne's Holy Sonnets spends her
10-hour days instructing 5-year-olds in simple phonics. Sure, she said, it
is gratifying to know that sophisticated audiences and critics understand
the point of her work, but no more than it is to know that her students are
beginning to associate sounds with their letters.
         "One guy today, I said something about a marker and he said, 'A
marker starts with mmm, mmm,' which means he's so close, he's going to get
it tomorrow," she said excitedly.
        Edson, as tall and lanky as a high-jumper, seems to feelthat she is
just as likely to change the world from within the walls of her classroom
as she is within the confines of the theater. "The more people learn to
read and the more different kinds of people learn to read, that's going to
help the world get fixed," she asserted. "It's so corny, but if there's a
 world that I want to see that has more justice in it,teaching is the way
for me to bring that about."
         Edson, whose theatrical experience was limited to high school
acting, is a relative newcomer to teaching, and to Atlanta. She moved here
three months ago because her partner, Linda Merrill, was hired recently as
a curator at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta. She taught first grade last
year in Washington,where she has lived most of her life, and taught
English-as-a-second-language as a church volunteer for several years before
that. She has written a second play, "Satisfied," about country-gospel
radio in Kentucky, but it has not been produced.
         "Wit" was written after Edson worked in two low-level jobs --
first as a physical therapy aide, then in a desk job as a unit clerk -- at
a hospital much like the one where the professor spends her final days.
         "As a unit clerk, you got to see a lot happen, and there wasn't so
much you could do about it," she said. "A nurse is only really able to see
the patients. She's not able to see herself responding to them. And the
patients could see the nurses coming to them, but they couldn't see
themselves. Because I had no skills, I could see the whole exchange. And so
being useless is really the key here to any kind ofinsight."
         As she watched patients battle with cancer and AIDS, Edson became
intrigued by the notion of writing about someone who moves from a position
of power to one of dependency. She considered other protagonists -- a
senator, a judge, a minister -- but settled on a scholar of Donne after
remembering that classmates at Smith College had told her that "Donne was
the hardest."
         She knew virtually nothing about his poetry, and spent hours
studying in the library. The easiest theatrical device, she said, would
have been for the dying professor to find succor in the flow of the sonnets
("And death shall be no more, Death thou shalt die"). Instead, Professor
Bearing, in her final moments, seems to take as much comfort from a
children's story, "The Runaway Bunny," as from the subject of her
scholarship. Edson said she was a bit surprised that audiences seem to
connect so viscerally with her work, which she said is really about "the
human touch."  But as a teacher, she is gratified that her message can be
understood in New York while she remains 750 miles away.
         "I like that what I have to say can stand without me there to
explain it," she said. "As a teacher, that is very threatening because, you
know, you need to be there to make sure that everybody gets it right. But
it sounds like they're getting it."

Barbara J. Kennedy
News Coordinator
University of Tennessee at Chattanooga
423-755-4363 (phone)
423-755-5299 (fax)