When I first called Margaret Edson to arrange an interview, I had no idea that she was about to win the Pulitzer Prize for her play, Wit. Nor did many other people, I expect, since she was still answering her telephone. Back then (oh, all those six months ago) no one knew much about Margaret Edson apart from the apparently contradictory facts that she'd written a hit play on Broadway but spent most of her time teaching (gasp!) kindergarten in Atlanta. A few newspaper articles and TV appearances notwithstanding, Edson lingered in blissful obscurity. When asked by reporters about future plays, she replied maddeningly that she hadn't finished any others and didn't necessarily intend to. She had a whole school of other fish to fry: teaching kindergartners to read wasn't a pastime, it was her passion.

Next came the Pulitzer Prize, and with it a new level of public curiosity. Before interviewing Edson on the News Hour, Jim Lehrer admitted that they were old acquaintances (she having attended the famous Sidwell Friends School with his daughter in Washington, D.C.). Lehrer listened to the usual Edsonian declaration that she loved absolutely everything about teaching and did not plan to pursue a life as a writer. He responded with fatherly flabbergast: "You know how few people win the Pulitzer Prize. It's a really big deal, Margaret, if you don't know, then I'm going to tell. … This is not going to change your life at all?"

"Once the day starts in the classroom," she replied, undaunted, "the affairs of the outside world really do not come into it at all. The day in the class has its own momentum. And New Yorkers find this very hard to believe, but the intricacies of New York theater are not part of what we're doing down in kindergarten."

No, and thank God for it! But despite Margaret Edson's disavowal of literary ambitions, she remains the rather literate person who, in the summer of 1991, wrote a two and a half-hour play turning upon the intricacies of metaphysical poetry and the use of wit as a shell for the soul. From a writer's point of view, what could be more ambitious than that? Even in its edited 90-minute form, Wit is a heady play, pitting the arcane vocabularies of medicine and literary criticism against one another in a brilliantly entertaining, if sometimes exhausting, word joust.

Not that Oscar Wilde could have written it; the drama in Wit arises from a woman's struggle with terminal cancer, hardly the stuff of light comedy. Prof. Vivian Bearing, renowned scholar of John Donne and terrorizer of hapless undergraduates, endures eight punishing rounds of chemotherapy with characteristic conceit (pun intended) and disdain for human weakness. She confronts a chest X-ray, for instance, by throwing down the literary gauntlet:

VIVIAN: I am a doctor of philosophy—

TECHNICIAN 1: (From offstage) Take a deep breath and hold it.

(Pause, with light and sound) Okay.

VIVIAN: a scholar of seventeenth-century poetry.

TECHNICIAN 1: (From offstage) Turn sideways, arms behind your head, and hold it. (Pause) Okay.

VIVIAN: I have made an immeasurable contribution to the discipline of English literature. (TECHNICIAN 1 returns and puts her in the wheelchair.) I am, in short, a force.

No worries about this play metastasizing to the screen, reappearing as some weepy Hollywood cancer opera. Though Vivian Bearing can certainly make us laugh, she doesn't easily provoke our tears; we feel she'd hate us for it. In fact, like the poetry she studies, Dr. Bearing is more wit and tongue than heart. She's become a subject for research, a text for passionless doctors to deconstruct. The most arrogant of her physicians is Dr. Jason Posner, a former student who brags that he took her class simply for the challenge and got a coveted A (well, an A-, he grudgingly admits). He tells Vivian this as he's performing a pelvic exam. Later in the play, a kind but not-too-bright nurse asks Jason about his student days with the famous Dr. Bearing:

SUSIE: She's not what I imagined. I thought somebody who studied poetry would be sort of dreamy, you know?

JASON: Oh, not the way she did it. It felt more like boot camp than English class. This guy John Donne was incredibly intense. Like your whole brain had to be in knots before you could get it.

SUSIE: He made it hard on purpose?

JASON: Well, it has to do with the subject. The Holy Sonnets we worked on most, they were mostly about Salvation Anxiety. That's a term I made up in one of my papers, but I think it fits pretty well. Salvation Anxiety. You're this brilliant guy, I mean, brilliant—this guy makes Shakespeare sound like a Hallmark card. And you know you're a sinner. And there's this promise of salvation, the whole religious thing. But you just can't deal with it.

SUSIE: How come?

JASON: It just doesn't stand up to scrutiny. But you can't face life without it either. So you write these screwed-up sonnets. Everything is brilliantly convoluted. Really tricky stuff. Bounding off the walls. Like a game, to make the puzzle so complicated.

SUSIE: But what happens in the end? … His Salvation Anxiety. Does he ever understand?

JASON: Oh, no way. The puzzle takes over. You're not even trying to solve it anymore. Fascinating, really. Great training for lab research.

Jason is, of course, a mirror image of Vivian herself, devoted to the means (research) rather than the end (salvation, whether physical or spiritual). Only a very cold-hearted writer could leave her characters in such a hellish state, and before the play's end, both Vivian and Jason do find (or in his case, begin to find) redemption. Vivian's salvation is certain once she realizes the power of death and her utter helplessness in the face of it. As a teacher she had praised Donne's distrust of simplicity:

So we have another instance of John Donne's agile wit at work: not so much RESOLVING the issues of life and God as REVELING in their complexity.

As a patient enduring unimaginable pain, she admits that nothing could be less appealing than "Erudition. Interpretation. Complication."

Now is not the time for … metaphysical conceit, for wit. … Now is a time for simplicity. Now is a time for, dare I say it, kindness.

Vivian accepts the tenderness of Susie, and in a scene brimming with religious meaning, listens tearfully while her old Donne professor, Dr. E. M. Ashford, reads her the only thing on hand—Margaret Wise Brown's The Runaway Bunny, a book for children.

E.M: … "Once there was a little bunny who wanted to run away.

So he said to his mother, "I am running away."

"If you run away," said his mother, "I will run after you. For you are my little bunny."

"If you run after me," said the little bunny, "I will become a fish in a trout stream and I will swim away from you."

"If you become a fish in a trout stream," said his mother, "I will be come a fisherman and I will fish for you."

(Thinking out loud) Look at that. A little allegory of the soul. No matter where it hides, God will find it. See, Vivian?

In the end, Vivian comes out of hiding, dropping all pretense, both metaphorical and literal. In a miraculous resurrection scene she steps from her nightgown, lets her cap fall to the ground, and sheds her hospital brace let (an act of God for sure—ever tried to get one of those off without scissors?). Naked and beautiful, she walks away from the chaos around her hospital bed toward a small light.

One writer asked Margaret Edson why she chose to end the play with Vivian in the buff.

"What else would you wear to a redemption?" Edson replied, laughing. "It's 'Come as you are!' "

I met Maggie Edson as arranged at the tenth annual Chattanooga Conference on Southern Literature. We spoke in a gallery of the elegant Read House Hotel just a day after she received an award from the Fellowship of Southern Writers and two days after I had a chance to see a fine reading of Wit sponsored by the Chattanooga Arts Council. My in formed belief is that Ms. Edson does know what sort of award she's won. Certainly she'll appreciate the fortune she makes from a commercial success (a rare thing for the off-screen arts). Fame, though, has blighted many a happy life, and so I hope for her sake that success in New York won't wreck her privacy in Atlanta or suck her away from Centennial Place Elementary. Though Edson herself doesn't seem to mind the attention to her or her profession ("it's opening minds"), my own opinion is that the world should have its brief look at her and move on. To misquote John Donne, "For God's sake, hold your tongues and let her teach!"

Betty Carter is a novelist living in Alabama.

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