Cynthia Nixon to Star in MTC's Broadway Premiere of Pulitzer Prize Winner Wit

Tony and Emmy winner Cynthia Nixon will return to the Broadway stage to play poetry professor Vivian Bearing in Wit, Margaret Edson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play. Manhattan Theatre Club will produce the Broadway premiere of the acclaimed drama at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre beginning January 5, 2012, and opening on January 26, directed by MTC artistic director Lynne Meadow. Additional casting and creative team members will be announced in the coming weeks.

MTC’s previously announced world premiere of David Auburn’s The Columnist will now begin previews at the Friedman Theatre on April 3, 2012, and open on April 25. Wit will follow the fall premiere of Venus in Fur, starring Nina Arianda.

Wit centers on a brilliant and exacting poetry professor (Nixon) as she undergoes experimental treatment for cancer. A scholar who devoted her life to academia, she must now face the irony and injustice of becoming the subject of research. The role was created by Kathleen Chalfant, who won acclaim for her performance in MCC Theater’s 1998 off-Broadway premiere production, directed by the late Derek Anson Jones. Emma Thompson played the role in an Emmy-winning 2001 HBO film version. Edson, winner of the 1999 Pulitzer Prize, is a public school teacher in Atlanta who never wrote a second play.

Nixon won a Best Actress Tony Award for MTC’s production of Rabbit Hole and is the winner of Emmys for Sex and the City (as Miranda Hobbes) and as a guest star on Law & Order: SVU. Her New York stage credits include Distracted, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, The Women and dual roles as a teen actress in the Broadway premieres of Hurlyburly and The Real Thing. She is currently featured on Showtime’s The Big C.