The role of Vivian Bearing, the acerbic John Donne scholar dying of ovarian cancer and ravaged by experimental chemotherapy in Wit, is a terrifically difficult one in that it requires a very broad emotional range—from wry detachment to mortal pathos—but at the same time it necessitates sustaining a single note almost from curtain to curtain: It is only in the play’s closing scenes that Professor Bearing’s cold and cerebral remoteness is breached by the agonizing final facts of life. Cynthia Nixon seems an unlikely choice for a role associated with Emma Thompson; though she had a distinguished stage career before Sex and the City made her a household name, there is a kind of insubstantiality about Miss Nixon—an Ophelia, not a Lady Macbeth. And she seemed merely competent, and even a trifle unsteady, in Clare Booth Luce’s The Women. Whether she has summoned some previously unknown steel or has been superbly directed by Lynne Meadow, her Professor Bearing is a remarkably vivid and complete character, the most skillfully executed in the three or four versions of the play I have seen.

She is also the funniest. Whereas Stephanie Barton-Farcas emphasized the anger and desperation of the character, as well as the savagery of her humor (The New Criterion, May 2010), Miss Nixon brings to the role pinpoint comic timing. There is a great deal of humor in the play that would not be obvious on the page, moments of levity that are entirely dependent