Spring mainstage play “Wit” brings audience to bedside of dying professor
Dr. Kelekian (Duncan Carrasco, left) uses Dr. Bearing’s cancer case as a lesson for his fellowship students (left to right: Aydan Toth, Maddie Kearns, Mi-Ree Zwick, Delaney Baker, Emily Hunt, and Kristen Welling).
Photo credit: Elizabeth Salo
By Elizabeth Salo
A student cast featuring many freshman actors performed its opening night of “Wit” on Friday, presenting a stirring drama dealing with issues of life, death and terminal illness to an audience of about 40 people in Borland’s Black Box Theatre.
Dr. Vivian Bearing (Mary Pieper) gives a lesson on John Donne’s poetry, as she would have before her cancer diagnosis. Photo: Elizabeth Salo.
Concordia’s Theatre Department presented the play by Margaret Edson, which follows Vivian Bearing, a professor of seventeenth-century poetry who specializes in John Donne’s “Holy Sonnets,” as she finds out she is dying of ovarian cancer and thinks back over her life. Mary Pieper, a freshman Vocal Music Education major, portrayed Dr. Bearing.
Throughout the play, Bearing has to deal with the poor bedside manner of some of the doctors, including Dr. Jason Posner, played by freshman Aydan Toth, who is a young doctor in a fellowship and has little experience treating patients as human beings.
Concordia alumnus Harley Storie attended the performance to support some of her friends who were involved with the show and really enjoyed the performance. She highlighted the realism of the play’s story.
“It was a really strong cast; they portrayed their characters really well,” said Storie. “They felt like real, human people, and it’s a well-written story. It’s very engaging. I hadn’t seen any iterations of this play before, so I liked the new experience, and I liked the way they put it on.”
Junior Theatre major Claire Horacek was the play’s assistant director and dramaturg, and she said that while there may have been a few minute hiccups, she was pleased with the performance and the amount of people who came to see the opening show.
Professor Bryan Moore had been planning the show since it was cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, and he was happy with how it turned out the second time around.
Mary Pieper takes a bow. Photo: Elizabeth Salo.
“I wanted to return to it because the process was very good at the time, and I thought it was an important story to tell,” said Moore. “I was ready to do a drama [this year] because it had been a little while since we’d done a drama, this show came back to mind, and I felt that I had a good group of students that would take on the challenge well. They did a great job.”
The cast consisted of Mary Pieper as Dr. Vivian Bearing, Duncan Carrasco as Dr. Harvey Kelekian/Mr. Bearing, Mackenzie Shepmann as Susie Monahan (RN, BSN), Aydan Toth as Dr. Jason Posner, Sarah Stepp as Dr. E.M. Ashford, and Delaney Baker, Emily Hunt, Maddie Kearns, Paige Schuster, Kristen Welling and Mi-Ree Zwick in various roles. Claire Horacek was the assistant director and dramaturg, Abby Braun was the stage manager, and the play was directed by Prof. Bryan Moore.
There will be two more performances of the play on March 28 at 7 p.m. and on March 29 at 2 p.m.
The Theatre Department’s next event will be their One-Act Play Festival on April 16-18.
