Winner of the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
THE STORY: Vivian Bearing, Ph.D., a renowned professor of English who has spent years studying and teaching the brilliant and difficult metaphysical sonnets of John Donne, has been diagnosed with terminal ovarian cancer. Her approach to the study of Donne: aggressively probing, intensely rational. But during the course of her illness—and her stint as a prize patient in an experimental chemotherapy program at a major teaching hospital—Vivian comes to reassess her life and her work with a profundity and humor that are transformative both for her and the audience.
Also winner of the Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Play.
In her extraordinary first play, Margaret Edson has created a work that is as intellectually challenging as it is emotionally immediate.
“[A] brutally human and beautifully layered new play…you feel both enlightened and, in a strange way, enormously comforted.” —The New York Times.
“A dazzling and humane new play that you will remember till your dying day.” —New York Magazine.
