Wit Edson Views
Margaret Edson (born 4 July 1961, Washington, D.C.) is an American playwright. Edson graduated with a B.A. in Renaissance History from Smith College, and received a master's in English literature from Georgetown University. Her jobs have included being a bicycle shop sales clerk and a volunteer ESL teacher.
Edson's first play was Wit, first produced in 1995 at South Coast Repertory in California, about a John Donne scholar who is hospitalized for and dying of ovarian cancer. Edson did use her work experience in a hospital as part of the background in writing Wit.[1][2] At the time of the first New York production of Wit in late 1998, Edson was a kindergarten teacher at Centennial Place Elementary School (Atlanta, Georgia). She won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for Wit.[3] After she won the Pulitzer Prize, Edson received a large amount of publicity, including an interview on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer on PBS. Edson has written a second play, Satisfied, whose subject is country-gospel radio in Kentucky .[2] As of April 2008, this second play has not received a production.
Edson, for a while, thought that she would earn a doctorate and pursue a career as an academic, much like Vivian Bearing. In 1991, Edson began a Masters program in literature at Georgetown University. While completing her degree, she volunteered at St. Margaret's Episcopal Church to tutor a boy from the Dominican Republic. By the time she came to write her thesis, she knew academe was not for her. Her thesis project, on the use of poetry to teach reading, concluded with an oral defense in which Edson performed a Queen Latifa rap number before her faculty review panel. Song and poetry are now integral to her teaching in the kindergarten classroom.
In 1985 she took a job as a clerk on an oncology/AIDS unit at a research hospital in Washington. The unit was doing clinical trials of the drug AZT for AIDS patients and developing new protocols for the treatment of ovarian cancer. In her unobtrusive clerical position, Edson was able to watch the interactions of very sick patients with their caregivers, and to observe how patients coped with their illnesses and the often dehumanizing environment of a bustling hospital. She left the hospital after a year, but the experience stayed with her. She went on to intern at a philanthropic organization and do fundraising for a mental health agency, where she published her first piece of writing, a training manual on the psychosocial aspects of AIDS, Living with AIDS: Perspectives for Caregivers.
Wit Edson Images
