Playwright Margaret Edson on Reading Between the Lines and Breathing Life Into Wit

About the author:
Call it beginner’s luck or call it talent: Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Margaret Edson has both. Between earning a degree in Renaissance history from Smith College and a master’s in English literature from Georgetown University, Edson worked in the cancer and AIDS unit in a research hospital. Witnessing the effects of the devastating illness firsthand served as inspiration for her first and only play, Wit. Initially produced off-Broadway in 1998, the moving tale of Vivian Bearing, a renowned but prickly poetry professor who is diagnosed with stage four cancer, won Edson the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and became an Emmy-winning HBO film in 2001. Edson now lives quietly in Atlanta, where she is a teacher at Centennial Place Elementary School, but her play is back in the headlines in its first Broadway engagement, starring Cynthia Nixon, at Manhattan Theatre Club's Samuel J. Friedman Theatre. Below, she gives Broadway.com an enlightening glimpse at the journey a play makes from words on a page to a living, breathing work onstage.

Think about it from my point of view. I write the play. With what? I have twenty-six letters of the alphabet, six punctuation marks, and that’s it. I can only provide strings of letters, arranged to make a script. The playwright supplies a code.

It’s just like a score in music. The composer makes a series of little marks on a series of straight lines. Higher, lower; longer, shorter; louder, softer: that’s all the composer gets to say. Nobody would mistake the score for the sound. Then a group of strangers picks up the paper, tunes up their instruments, and—ah, music!

When I write for live performance I line up my little marks as precisely as I can. I am attentive to each syllable: higher, lower; louder, softer. Playwrights have to think about time in a way that novelists don’t. The show must go on—forward. My chief worry is drag. So I trim, slice, cut, hack at my pages to set them in motion. Then my work is done, and I step back. Out of the way, to be precise.

Then the director comes in, bringing a troupe of actors. As they stretch out their limbs and voices and finish their coffee, they are themselves. Who knows who; I saw you in that; I studied with them; sports; weather. The director addresses them, describing something that does not yet exist: the performance. Everyone in the rehearsal room—actor, designer, stage manager, intern—shares this distant vision. Their only strategy is hard work: ten hours a day, six days a week.

The actors read the written symbols—the lines—so carefully that the words enter the actors’ brains. Very quickly in the rehearsal process the actors set down the script. They go off book. The letters and marks I strung together are stored in the actors’ bodies. They know them by heart.

The director is perched at rehearsal, one eye on the script and the other eye on the stage. The director and the actors work together to turn words into action, to turn events into meaning. The words on the page just hint at what happens on the stage. The transformation from page to stage is guided at every step, every breath, by the director. The director is captain, coach, parent, confidante, taskmaster, conductor, nurturer, intimidator. At one moment, “You’ll have to discover this for yourself.” One minute later: “Stand over there. There!” Then: “What if we tried this?”

Tech week is the final week of preparation, when the project moves from the cozy rehearsal room to the cold, empty theater. Light cues are set and adjusted as the actors walk through the play, second by second for twelve hours a day. The exhausted director says to the exhausted cast and crew, “If we move the chair three inches to the right—no, two—” and everyone thinks, This is how we reveal the meaning of the play. The entire design team is summoned to look at a moment of lighting. Huddle, plan, try it, no, huddle again, wait, no, how about: perfect.

For all its passion and nitpicking, rehearsal is a shadow. But the time for substance comes quickly. Open the house! Bring in the audience. Let the play play out.

The audience creates each moment. I scribble; the actors huff and puff; the designers set and reset. But the real work is done by the people who have stopped their lives for an evening to join us. Why on earth? Because all we have is each other. Live theater only exists as a community. We all bring what we have to offer: our selves.