Of ‘Wit’ and Wisdom

Cancer. It is a fear that cuts across generations, a nightmare that binds all those who have suffered--or loved someone who suffered--its pain and humiliations. It is a disease that may come to define death in the 21st century.

But is it television?

In turning Margaret Edson’s intensely emotional Pulitzer Prize-winning play, “Wit,” into a made-for-television movie, HBO appears to be taking an extraordinary risk: that Americans sitting comfortably at home on a Saturday night will subject themselves to the trauma of an ovarian cancer patient undergoing a brutal and futile chemotherapy treatment for the benefit of research.

Director Mike Nichols believes they will, and not just because television viewers routinely sit through the traumatic, if emotionally less complex, medical emergencies of “ER” and other such shows.

“It is about the mystery of death, and it is about the use by medical research of people who cannot be helped in order to help other people through research,” Nichols said. “It is a very complicated, maybe insolvable, problem. If those who can’t be helped don’t suffer, others can never be helped.”

“Wit” combines an ancient fascination and a latter-day dilemma: We all die, and now more and more of us confront the contradictions of modern medicine. Most people who have witnessed cancer treatment have a war story to tell, and, seated in his trailer during a break in filming “Wit” here last fall, Nichols recounted his.

“A very dear friend of mine died of cancer last year. When they had to stop chemotherapy, he asked, ‘How long do I have?’ And the doctor answered, ‘Oh, I hate it when people ask me that.’ ”

Nichols paused for the callousness to achieve full effect.

“You could say it motivated me to do this,” he said.

Getting the Bad News

“Wit” is the story of Vivian Bearing (played by Emma Thompson), a professor of 17th century poetry who specializes in John Donne’s “Holy Sonnets” but is more attuned to their punctuation and form than to their feeling for life and death.

Bearing is told she has advanced ovarian cancer by Dr. Harvey Kelekian (played by Christopher Lloyd), an oncology specialist who is, like her, a 50-year-old professor dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge. They approach her illness intellectually.

“You can see his eyes glitter when he realizes, ‘Ah, she’s tough enough; we’ve got one here,’ ” Thompson said here earlier this year.

The doctor urges Bearing to take the maximum dose of an experimental chemotherapy. As he explains the dread disease, Bearing fixates on the language he is using, a language her beloved father (played by Harold Pinter) had taught her to love. They commiserate on the poor quality of students today.

Through treatment and deteriorating health, however, Bearing discovers there is more to life than intellectual brilliance. While student doctors regard her as a specimen, she reflects on the treatment she meted out to her own students. From powerful and accomplished professor, she is stripped down to the powerless patient recalling her past.

In one flashback, a student approaches her at her desk after class to ask for an extension on the paper that is soon due.

“Don’t tell me. Your grandmother died,” the forbidding Bearing said.

“You knew?”

“It was a guess.”

“I have to go home.”

“Do what you will, but the paper is due when it is due.”

The dying Bearing searches for signs of humanity in the white glare of University Hospital, unsuccessfully at first with the young research fellow Jason (Jonathan M. Woodward), who is awed by the cancer cells’ infinite capacity to multiply but is bored by patients. She finally finds kindness and a human connection with nurse Susie Monahan (Audra McDonald), who cares for Bearing and helps her to die.

Thompson, who had worked with Nichols’ on the 1998 film “Primary Colors,” brought the “Wit” script to his attention. He enjoys turning plays into movies, having done so previously with “Carnal Knowledge,” released in 1971. He loved “Wit” and thought it would be a great role for Thompson.

Thompson was drawn to the project by Edson’s writing and Bearing’s character.

“Her stubborn intellectual courage and wit. Her reaction in the face of that inhumane challenge is to meet it rather than to challenge it, with all of the paradoxes inherent in that. . . . She has that curious combination of Puritanism and passion that produces such perverse strength,” Thompson said.

“It is always interesting to make a journey with someone who has been deconstructed. We kind of go inside of her and with her toward her death,” she said. “The only way she can hold on to her power is by not betraying anything. But of course she can’t do that forever.”

Still, Bearing starts out as a remote and rather soulless character. Will people identify with her enough to accompany her on the journey that we all hope to avoid?

“You don’t have to know someone to be curious about them,” Thompson said. “I don’t know any kings, but I enjoyed ‘King Lear.’ ”

Taking On a Difficult Subject

Thompson, who shaved her head to play Bearing and still wears her hair short, offers that it is often easier to experience something so difficult as cancer with someone you do not know. But she is impatient with the question of commercial appeal.

“This was not made to get as many people as possible to turn on the television,” she said. “We made it because it was very important, because there’s very little about our lives [on television]. There is nothing written about death, not really. It isn’t merely about death. It is about so many other things--the human soul.”

But of course it matters to HBO whether viewers turn on the television to watch “Wit.” It is a film about cancer, what executive producer Kerry Brokaw admitted was “always thought of as the ultimate commercial no-no.”

“No one takes risks anymore. Thank God for HBO,” Thompson said. “It is different from the normal fare. Good luck to those who have chosen to accompany us on this journey.”

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“Wit” can be seen Saturday at 9 p.m. on HBO. The network has rated it TV-14-SLD (may be unsuitable for children younger than 14, with special advisories for sexual situations, coarse language and suggestive dialogue).