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The most liberal of the arts
A special performance of Wit at Bethel will bring disciplines and the community together.
by Melanie Zuercher
For Megan Upton-Tyner, theater is about more than entertainment, as important as she thinks that is.
Still in her first year as instructor of theater at Bethel, Megan has a directing opportunity that falls square into what she sees as theater’s most important role: to engage the community.
The play in question is Wit by Margaret Edson, winner of the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, which will be performed on the Krehbiel Auditorium stage May 5-7. Wit follows the last hours of a single, middle-aged academic and Donne scholar, Vivian Bearing, as she is dying of ovarian cancer after undergoing an experimental and aggressive regime of chemotherapy.
Wit will be unlike any Bethel production in recent memory – not in treating difficult and often painful subject matter, but in cast makeup, playwright participation, and the way Megan has envisioned and planned for connections across disciplines.
Casting of the three main characters, already complete, is age-appropriate: Annette Thornton, former Bethel adjunct instructor in dance and theater who currently is director of musical theater at Central Michigan University, Mount Pleasant, and does choreography for Broadway at Bethel each summer, will play Vivian; John McCabe-Juhnke ’78, professor of communication arts, will play the oncologist, Dr. Harvey Kelekian; and veteran Wichita actress and retired instructor at Wichita State University Joyce Cavorozzi will play Vivian’s revered teacher and mentor, E.M. Ashford.
There are student roles in Wit for Dr. Kelekian’s young assistant, Jason Posner, Vivian’s nurse, Susie Monahan, and other students in medicine and English literature.
Playwright Edson will be on the Bethel campus to speak in convocation and see the play performed Friday, May 6, and to participate in a talk-back session after the Friday performance.
The story of how Wit got to Bethel College begins with two sisters, Bethel alumnae Janet and Joy Goldsmith.
Joy graduated in 1992 with a degree in communication. After some years of experience in directing theater, she entered a master of fine arts degree program at the University of Oklahoma. While she was there, she got a request from the OU Health Sciences Center to direct Wit as part of Palliative Care Week.
Although she agreed to the assignment, she admits she didn’t have a lot of enthusiasm for it. The play was performed for an audience of several thousand clinicians, with a talk-back session afterward. Joy discovered this particular production was part of a large grant to perform Wit for audiences of medical professionals across the country, and has since seen it used in various settings as a tool for getting those professionals to “talk about talk” – how they relate to dying patients.
“[Directing Wit] made me see how far away I was from directly impacting the community,” Joy says. “Not long afterward, I switched to an interdisciplinary Ph.D. – I still did the M.F.A. but also did study and research in the theory of communication.”
About nine months later, in February 2002, Joy’s older sister, Janet Forts Goldsmith ’90, was diagnosed with terminal cancer. She died Dec. 30, 2002.
“Joy put her life on hold to be with Janet when [the disease] became critical,” John McCabe-Juhnke notes. “She has seen palliative care from the inside.”
Joy is now associate professor of communication and chair of the communication department at Young Harris College (YHC) in north Georgia. Her main research area is applying qualitative methodologies to the context of palliative and end-of-life health communication, including a new communication protocol that specifically addresses terminal conversations between patients and providers.
Joy made a successful grant proposal in 2009 that resulted in a conference in early 2010 at YHC on the performance of palliative care, and included health-care providers, communication scholars and cancer survivors. A centerpiece of the conference was a staged reading of Wit. Joy invited Margaret Edson, the dean of a school near Atlanta, to come. She asked her former professors, Annette Thornton and John McCabe-Juhnke, to read the parts of Vivian and Dr. Kelekian.
“Joy told me later that Maggie Edson was very enamored of Annette’s reading [of Vivian],” says John. “She said she’d like to see a fully staged production with Annette in the role and that she would come for it.”
That was not an offer Bethel or Megan Upton-Tyner could let go by. And if Bethel was bringing Margaret Edson to campus, it needed to be a major event.
Funds from the Greer Fine Arts Endowment were made available to help support Edson’s visit to Bethel. The late Robert C. ’48 and Amparo Goering, Wichita, established the endowment in 1979 in memory of their friend Milford E. Greer.
The performance dates were set and Edson had agreed to come – at which time, Megan discovered that, serendipitously, May 6 begins National Nursing Week.
Bethel Assistant Professor of Nursing Joanne Kaster began using the 2001 movie version of Wit as a teaching tool last spring. “We showed it to our senior nursing students,” she says, “and discussed it and critiqued it afterward. Our focus was on communication, attitudes of health-care personnel, respect of patients, listening skills and personal values.
“Our goal was to have our students – our future nurses – look at the entire picture of a patient traveling a difficult path, and the importance of being a patient advocate.” The department plans to regularly use the movie, she says.
Megan contacted Phyllis Miller, director of nursing, to see how the department could connect with Edson’s visit to campus and the performance of the play.
All nursing students will be encouraged to see the play, preferably on Friday night when there will be a talk-back session with Edson, although Phyllis and Megan hope to arrange a special session with Edson and nursing students. There are also plans for how to involve the broader health-care community through Newton Medical Center.
Because Annette will be on campus only for the week of the play, a student understudy will learn the role for rehearsals before then. Megan envisions having the Bethel-based cast work up excerpts from Wit to perform in community settings beyond campus and encourage discussion of the issues the play raises.
Phyllis is enthusiastic about the possibilities. “Collaboration between departments makes for a rich experience for our students,” she says. “Nurses don’t work in a vacuum. When they’re out of school, they have to work in multi-disciplinary settings to deliver patient care. This example of collaboration across disciplines is useful as a way to think about doing it in the workplace. And there aren’t generally a lot of opportunities [like this] on campus for our juniors and seniors.”
Megan also sees ways for nursing to contribute to theater, through having nursing faculty come to Living in Performance classes to talk about using Wit to teach empathy. “This opportunity [with Wit] hits at what Bethel is about and the niche I’m trying to carve out for Bethel theater,” Megan says. “It goes beyond the stage, out into the community. It engages a different part of our humanity. This is an excellent example of how theater can influence and teach people.
“In my short time here, I’ve appreciated the drive – whether from students, administration or faculty – to engage the world, to think outside one small community. Even as a kid growing up, that’s how I thought of theater. Entertainment is wonderful – it’s a great ministry to give people something else besides their problems to think about for a couple of hours. But the possibilities are endless for engagement and change.”
“What Joy did at Young Harris College with the palliative care symposium was the model for how theater can be incorporated into an interdisciplinary dialogue,” John adds. “The primary purpose of theater in a liberal arts setting is to help us engage in conversation on a variety of levels.
“Theater is the most ‘liberal’ of the arts,” he says. “Our hope for our students is to be able to understand theater’s place in the broader conversation.”
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