Staff Report

WIT is a play about dying, but it is filled with humor and hope. It brings enlightenment, and comfort.

The play opens this weekend, the latest production by Thunder River Theatre Co.

It runs March 28-30 and April 2-5 in the Open Space of the Carbondale Community School on Dolores Way in Carbondale. Showtime is 7:30 on Fridays and Saturdays, 6 p.m. on Sunday, March 30.

Playwright Margaret Edson won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1999 for WIT.

“It’s about a person who has built up a lot of skills during her life who finds herself in a new situation where those skills and those great capacities don’t serve her very well,” Edson said in an interview on the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. “So she has to disarm, and then she has to become a student. She has to become someone who learns new things.”

Edson’s play is both intellectually stimulating and emotionally immediate as it focuses on Dr. Vivian Bearing, a distinguished English professor who has been diagnosed with a terminal illness.

The play is directed and designed by Thunder River artistic director Lon Winston and features associate artist Valerie Haugen.

Company members Richard Lyon, Julia Whitcombe, Michael Miller, Lana Karp, Susan Lau and Kelley Mauldin are featured along with George Soukup, new to the TRTC stage.

Opening night is sponsored by the Barbara Ornitz Cancer Challenge Foundation, Caring Connections and Hospice, and dedicated to the memory of Barbara Ornitz, who died last September from ovarian cancer. A reception and discussion with TRTC’s director, actors and the above organizations will immediately follow the performance.

Tickets are $15, or $12 for members of the Carbondale Council on Arts and Humanities. For information, call 963-1680.