Event

WIT

The Apron Theater Company, was founded by Karla Baldwin, Hallie Flower, and Carrie Kidd. Wit marks Apron's return to the local theatre scene, its first production as the Next Stage Arts Project's "theater-company-in-residence." Said Next Stage board member, Billy Straus, "we are thrilled to be expanding our repertoire of cultural presentations in the community to include theater, and particularly of this caliber. Apron is a wonderful partner for our organization."

Wit follows the last hours of a brilliant & exacting poetry professor undergoing experimental treatment for ovarian cancer. The NY Times called it:"[A] brutally human and beautifully layered new playyou feel both enlightened and, in a strange way, enormously comforted." Dr. Vivian Bearing (played by Keely Eastley) specializes in the Holy Sonnets of 17th century poet John Donne. She confronts her illness with the same probing intellect she has applied to her work - rational; exacting. Under the care of Dr. Kelekian (Greg Lesch), research fellow, Dr. Jason Posner (Mark Bateman), and her primary nurse, Suzie Monahan (Julia Tadlock), Vivian enters an unfamiliar world which puts into question the choices and habits of a lifetime. Jeanne L. Austin plays her brilliant mentor, Professor E.M. Ashford and Ben Stockman create the medical and academic worlds that come in and out of her thoughts.

Margaret Edson has described her play Wit as an examination of kindness, human connection, and finding a way to grace. When is intellect strength or limitation? What is the power of human kindness? How do we face and accept our mortality? How can we live a full and connected life? Ultimately, Wit is an affirmation, a sometimes brutal; often funny experience of living toward grace.