September 23, 2008
Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright to headline cancer colloquium
American playwright Margaret Edson, who won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for "W;t" in 1999, will be the keynote speaker and lead a series of activities during Purdue's Cancer Culture & Community Colloquium on Nov. 5-7.
Edson will lecture on several scenes of her award-winning play at 7:30 p.m. Nov. 6 in Fowler Hall, Stewart Center. Performers from Purdue Theatre will act out scenes of the play during Edson's talk. A book signing follows at 8:30 p.m.
She also will lead writing workshops at 11:30 a.m. and again at 1:30 p.m. Nov. 7 in Stewart Center, Room 310. An event, titled "Scenes and Discussions with Margaret Edson," follows at 3 p.m. at the Mallett Theatre in Pao Hall of Visual and Performing Arts.
A screening of the movie "W;t" also is planned the night before Edson's campus activities at 7 p.m. Nov. 5 at the Long Center for Performing Arts, 111 N. 6th St., Lafayette.
All events are free and open to the public.
The play follows the character Vivian Bearing, a John Donne scholar and professor of English who is hospitalized and dying of ovarian cancer. Through her illness, she begins to assess her life in what has been characterized as a profound and humorous journey of transformation.
The play was first produced in 1995 at South Coast Repertory in California, and Edson used her work experience in a hospital for background in writing the play. At its New York debut in 1998, she taught kindergarten at Centennial Place Elementary School in Atlanta. She still teaches there.
Edson received a bachelor's degree in Renaissance History from Smith College and a master's in English literature from Georgetown University. She has held various odd jobs over the years, from a volunteer teacher of English as a second language to serving as a sales clerk in a bicycle shop to selling hot dogs and working as a physical therapist in a hospital.
Her second play, "Satisfied," focuses on country-gospel radio in Kentucky.