63 pages • 2 hours read
Margaret EdsonWit
Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 1995A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Scenes 1-2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Scene 1 Summary
The first scene of the play opens on Dr. Vivian Bearing, who is standing in the middle of the stage wearing a hospital gown, identification bracelet, and a baseball cap. She holds onto an IV pole as she addresses the audience directly. She talks about the irony of being asked how she feels every day when she’s clearly sick, and she jokingly remarks that she is “sorry” she will miss when someone asks her that “question and [she] is dead” (5).
From there, Vivian quickly sets the scene: she is a professor of seventeenth-century poetry who has been diagnosed with stage-four metastatic ovarian cancer, but her treatment is not working. Although Vivian says she hates to “give away the plot,” she reveals that she has “less than two hours” to live before the scene closes (6-7).
Scene 2 Summary
The scene shifts to an office and Vivian sits down across from Dr. Harvey Kelekian, the chief of medical oncology at the University Hospital. He tells her she has “advanced metastatic ovarian cancer” with little presence, then launches into a clinical—and complicated—explanation of her very aggressive treatment plan. Vivian analyzes the language Kelekian uses as he speaks, both to better understand what he says and to cope. She only interjects when he tells her to take a break from teaching, which she emphatically refuses.
Kelekian tells Vivian she’s “very tough” during her treatment, which will cause significant side effects like hair loss and intestinal issues. Vivian tells the audience that she is “tough,” “demanding,” and “uncompromising,” which is why she decided to study John Donne’s poetry.
The scene changes once again, and Vivian—now twenty-two and an undergraduate—is sitting across from her mentor and professor, E. M. Ashford. Ashford has just told Vivian she must rewrite her essay on Donne’s “Holy Sonnet Six,” which she has misinterpreted. Vivian’s edition has the wrong punctuation, which changes the meaning of the poem. Ashford explains “nothing but a breath—a comma—separates life from life everlasting […] With the original punctuation restored, death is no longer something to act out on a stage […] It’s a comma, a pause” (14-15).
Ashford’s harshness turns to tenderness as Vivian packs up to leave. She gently encourages Vivian to go enjoy herself with her friends before rewriting the paper, but Vivian cannot abandon her work. Instead, she tells the audience that she “went back to the library” (15). With that, the flashback comes to a close and Vivian returns to the present. She agrees to take the full dose of chemotherapy every time since it will be a “significant contribution to knowledge” (16).
Scenes 1-2 Analysis
These opening scenes function as Edson’s quick introduction to Vivian and the play’s conflict: Vivian’s cancer. Readers and viewers meet Vivian in as close to full health as possible at her diagnosis and as a young undergraduate student. She is obviously intelligent; Vivian prides herself in her ability to understand and analyze language, and she self-identifies first and foremost as a thinker and scholar. But she is also tough and dedicated, too. Dr. Kelekian tells her that the chemotherapy will make her feel terrible, and he tells her that there will be “times when you’ll wish for a lesser dose” (11). But Vivian commits to the chemotherapy, telling him to “give [her] the full dose, the full dose every time” (11). Vivian doubles down on her course of action not because she wishes to get well, but because if she must be sick, she wants to be a “significant contribution to knowledge” (16). This decision highlights another core aspect of Vivian’s character: for Vivian, the pursuit of knowledge is everything.
To build Vivian’s character so quickly, Edson relies on an unusual theatrical technique. She has Vivian break the fourth wall, the metaphorical barrier that often separates the play from the audience. The fourth wall lets actors pretend the audience does not exist, which in turn makes the audience feel itis watching a real scene unfold. When an actor breaks the fourth wall, speaking directly to the audience, the audience’s attention is drawn to the fact that it is watching a play. This is called “metatheater.”
Edson breaks the fourth wall to destabilize her audience. Modern audiences expect convention, which usually involves being spectators of the performance, not participants in it. But Vivian invites viewers into her story from its very first moments, and because it is so unexpected, it makes the audience wonder what to expect next. In other words, it makes the audience uncomfortable, which is Edson’s goal. Death might be uncomfortable to witness, but it is excruciating to go through firsthand; Edson uses the fourth wall to tear down the barriers between observation and experience.
Breaking the fourth wall also forces the audience to connect with Vivian. Because Vivian can tell viewers what she is thinking and feeling, there is no question about what she experiences on stage. Instead of watching Vivian’s death from the outside as observers, Edson forces the audience to ride shotgun with Vivian as she begins to die, to stand face-to-face with death as Vivian walks viewers through her memories, experiences, and feelings.
