Wit.

Such dual vision can be uncomfortable, even agonizing, as it is in another strikingly literary play that has taken New York by storm. The gorgeously intellectual Wit, elementary-school teacher Margaret Edson's remarkable first play, centers around a brilliant professor of English literature who is hospitalized with advanced ovarian cancer. As research-oriented oncologists swoop down to study her, Vivian Bearing, Ph.D. (played with well-calibrated shrewdness and occasional vulnerability by Kathleen Chalfant, a red baseball cap on her bald head), reflects on her own field of study, the poetry of John Donne. With humor, irony, and a certain exhilaration, the play draws out contrasts and parallels between two kinds of knowledge - medical and literary - and two ways of approaching life - via thought and via sympathy. The taut off-Broadway production, which has been so successful it recently moved to a larger theater, is directed by Derek Anson Jones.

Bearing, who once reveled in the cerebral games (the "wit") of Donne's Holy Sonnets, finds that language can u longer shield her from the terrifying truths of existence. Death, a word she once parsed along with a verse's syntax, starts to overwhelm her as it becomes physical, a matter of tubes and fluids. (In the current production, scenic designer Myung Hee Cho exploits the average viewer's hospital phobia with sweeping synthetic curtain-partitions that change color, from stark white to sickly green, with the lighting.) Not that she succumbs without mustering an attitude: "I would prefer that a play about me be cast in the mythic-heroic-pastoral mode," she sniffs in one of many direct remarks to the audience.

But, trained as she is in intellectual rigors, the dying professor can still detect the pattern behind the particulars. She can understand the distracted manner of the young medical fellow (the boyishly officious Alec Phoenix) who views her as a collection of cells, rather than a person. And she can even describe her own life's narrative arc: "I am becoming proficient at suffering," she observes - a remark Electra might echo.

Wit is full of suffering, but, to its credit, nearly devoid of sentimentality. Juggling ideas about knowledge and authority, the rift between the sciences and humanities, the power of words, and other weighty matters, it often resembles a poem by Donne. As in Donne, the emotion is in the thought. "A thought to Donne was an experience," T. S. Eliot wrote in his seminal essay "The Metaphysical Poets," in which he posited that metaphysical poets, like Donne, were among the last English writers able to "feel their thought as immediately as the odor of a rose." After them, Eliot believed, a "dissociation of sensibility" set into literature, driving a wedge between thought and feeling.

It is because our sensibility is still dissociated that productions like Electra and Wit shock. Because we approach thought and feeling as if they were oil and water, we are surprised when the word attitude means two things at once, when anguish suffuses a drama of ideas, or when petulance rages from the elegant frame of a Greek tragedy.