WIT by Margaret Edson is Coming to City Theatre of Austin

City Theatre Austin will bring to the stage Margaret Edson’s award-winning play WIT. Exquisitely written, affecting, and often humorous, WIT follows a brilliant and exacting poetry professor as she embarks on a bold journey to save her life, battling a deadly disease which affects millions of people worldwide each year. It is a dazzling and life-affirming play that you will long remember after the curtain has come down.
 
WIT tells the story of Vivian Bearing, a renowned but uncompromising English professor who has spent years teaching the brilliant and difficult metaphysical sonnets of John Donne. Bearing has been diagnosed with terminal ovarian cancer, the deadly disease in which 25,000 women are diagnosed annually. During the course of her illness — and her stint as a prize patient in an experimental chemotherapy program at a major teaching hospital — she comes to reassess her life and her work with a profundity, grace, and humor that are transformative both for her and the audience. There will be a “Wall of Hope” for audience members to sign in honor and memory of loved ones who have battled cancer. Signatures and messages can also be given online. Go to the City Theatre Facebook page and include your message.
 
Leading the cast is Austin actor Taylor Flanagan. Taylor is a multidisciplinary theatre-maker and a recent finalist in the Del Shores Foundation Writers Search. Over the years, she has performed in more than eighty plays, adapted classic works with a queer lens, received various B. Iden Payne awards and Broadway World nominations, and co-written award-winning short plays for FronteraFest. “I love the way this play as a whole—and this role specifically—confronts the maddening links between suffering and humor, pride and humility, a dehumanizing health ‘care’ system and the humans within it that actually do care,” mentions Flanagan. “It has been a real honor to explore so far.” Featured also in the cast are Andrew Solis, Stephanie Salama, Julien Hemmendinger, Alan Brent, Dawn Azbill-Smith, Adriana Fontanez, Reed Syzdek, and CB Feller. Newcomer artist Adam Adolfo directs the production. Adam is the former Executive Artistic Director for Fort Worth's Artes de la Rosa Cultural Center for the Arts and is making his Austin directing debut at City Theatre Austin. "I'm so excited to be a part of the City Theatre family with this powerfully theatrical take on a play that explores the human condition with grace and humor."
 

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