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On Stage by Lori Montgomery Over the course of a few millennia, homo sapiens have spent an overwhelming amount of time and energy trying to reconcile ourselves to a rather simple fact – that we will eventually die. Whether it’s viewed through a lens of creative endeavour or critical analysis, the awareness of mortality is one of the defining characteristics of the species – a species which holds "rage against the dying of the light" as heroic. Dr. Vivian Bearing, the central character in Wit (now playing at ATP), is a professor of 17th century English literature steeped in this tradition. Like John Donne, the subject of her life’s work, Vivian strives to outwit death, and only a diagnosis of stage four, metastatic ovarian cancer can give her pause. "I thought being extremely smart would take care of it," she recalls. She was, of course, wrong. Playwright Margaret Edson has crafted an exquisite portrait of an intelligent woman’s struggle with death, and without diminishing Donna Belleville’s sensitive performance as Vivian, or Bob White’s unobtrusive staging, it must be said that given such a remarkable script, it would be difficult to take a wrong turn. Belleville, however, animates the character with a gentle humour that illuminates something easily missed in the context of the richly complex story – Vivian is looking back with almost serene hindsight at her life and its end, and guiding us along a journey she’s already completed. "It is not my intention to give away the plot, but I think I die at the end," she points out. Vivian could be a woman of extremely hard edges, bitter at her fall in stature. "What we have come to think of as me is just the specimen jar," she observes as she is subjected to the indignities of her treatment. Belleville, however, takes her cue from Vivian’s observation early in the play that irony and humour will set the tone for this story, and her emphasis lies in moments such as the one during a particularly harrowing course of treatment in which Vivian speculates on the implications for her career if she were to literally "barf her brains out." The surreal setting – a stark hospital bed set against a baroque backdrop – tells us that none of this is real, that these are merely fragments of Vivian’s recollections of her life. Her physicians, her nurse, her former mentors serve as reflections of the good and bad that Vivian sees in her own life. Complexity is the central conceit of the play. Vivian’s own study of Donne’s metaphysical sonnets, her recollections of her distinguished career, and the harsh clinical details of her treatment coalesce to form a strikingly simple and ultimately liberating view of life and death. In the end, the things that give meaning to Vivian’s life are not her scholarly achievements or the contribution her death makes to the advancement of oncological knowledge, but a popsicle shared with a compassionate friend and a deceptively simple children’s story. Wit runs at the Martha Cohen Theatre until May 20. **** Several weeks ago, I interviewed Chong Tze Chien, a playwright from Singapore who had the opportunity to come to Calgary to work with Grade 8 students on some dramatic writing about life in Singapore. Following his week here, Chong brought ATP playwright-in-residence Eugene Stickland home with him to sample the local culture and to counsel some Singaporan students on their own plays, set in Calgary. Stickland is back in town, and has some interesting recollections about working with the kids. "I heard them read their plays, and then gave wonderful dramaturgical advice to them," says the modest local writer, with tongue surgically implanted in cheek. He points out that apart from simply helping them to improve their writing, he had to correct some misconceptions about Calgary students, and instruct them on matters of language – with a very special regional edge. It was particularly "the idiom of southwest Calgary parlance" that the kids needed to master, he explains. "I’m a southwesterner. I’m very true to my quadrant," he says with deadpan earnestness. "I think we should have more quadrant pride in Calgary. I’m on the cusp between Sunalta and Scarborough, which I think might be one of the most significant cusps in all of Calgary." In fact, he insists that he did instruct the students on the quadrant system in the course of the creation of a play, which apparently had inauspicious beginnings. "I never saw the first draft, but apparently it was quite terrible," Stickland says. "It really depicted Calgary students as sort of like Beverly Hills 90210. Same concerns, same reality." After Chong gently corrected some misconceptions – including the idea that L.A. was in Canada – the students went back to the drawing board and came up with a play that Stickland appreciated, called A Calgarian’s Worst Nightmare. "There’s a really Alice In Wonderland kind of feel to this piece," he says. "What they perceive this worst nightmare to be for a Calgarian is to be totally subsumed by Americana.... For someone like me, a Canadian playwright, I would argue that my whole life is about (the fact that) whatever I’m doing is part of Canadian culture, right? I didn’t move to L.A. to write for a sitcom. But for most people, and even for me in some ways, it’s a tricky question."

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