ATTITUDE

...Wit is full of suffering, but, to its credit, nearly devoid of sentimentality...

...I will never cease to call out my pain and my complaint...

...Huch dual vision can be uncomfortable, even agonizing, as it is in another strikingly literary play that has taken New York by storm...

...Everyone she meets falls under her spell—even the Chorus of Mycenae (played as a knowing peasant woman in a headscarf by actress Pat Carroll) is fascinated by her...

...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...

...governed by attitude in its traditional sense (an arrangement or posture) rather than its slangy modern sense (a sort of egoistic crankiness...

...Downstage, a dingy white plank, suggesting both an altar and a hospital bed, and a few broken chairs rest on the dirt that covers the entire stage surface...

...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...

...She throws herself full-length on a stylized altar and then pitches herself off it to roll on the ground in utter despair...

...Which, in a sense, she is—the creepily stark set (designed by Johan Engels) consists of a gray brick wall enclosing a gigantic gray sheet-metal door that is left partially ajar so people can slip in and out to murder each other...

...Similarly swayed by Wanamaker's charisma, the audience can almost see Electra giving the cycle of violence a helpful little push...

...And she can even describe her own life's narrative arc: "I am becoming proficient at suffering," she observes—a remark Electra might echo...

...But if we can spot greatness in Electra—in the dignity of Claire Bloom, dressed in scarlet as the regal, doomed Clytemnestra, for example—we can see the meanness as well...

...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...

...It is because our sensibility is still dissociated that productions like Electra and Wit shock...

...After them, Eliot believed, a "dissociation of sensibility" set into literature, driving a wedge between thought and feeling...

...Camping outside the palace, where Clytemnestra is living with a lover, Electra wallows in grief so ostentatious it makes sackcloth and ashes look like confetti...

...As in Donne, the emotion is in the thought...

...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...

...Just as the play's drab color scheme appears, after her entrance, to echo the brown of her coat, so the blight on her family and their dependents begins to seem an extension of her mood...

...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...

...As research-oriented oncologists swoop down to study her, Vivian Bearing, Ph.D...

...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...

...Commonweal 24 January 29,1999...

...she wails in this electrically tense production, which David Leveaux has directed from Irish playwright Frank McGuinness's newly adapted script...

...But the play's near-unwavering focus on its heroine—from the unnerving offstage wail that heralds her first appearance to her final vindication—suggests a less literal meaning for the desolation at Mycenae...

...Mourning for her father, King Agamemnon of Mycenae, years after her mother Clytemnestra killed him, the eponymous heroine of the Sophocles tragedy Electra is obstinate, opinionated, and more than a little smug...

...Bearing, who once reveled in the cerebral games (the "wit") of Donne's Holy Commonweal 2 3 January 29,1999 Sonnets, finds that language can no longer shield her from the terrifying truths of existence...

...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...

...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...

...The actress's short spiky hair appears to be balding in places, and when she laments, her voice sometimes rasps as if she were at death's door...

...Individuals in tragedy often fade into the stately pattern of life, death, and fate...

...Playing the title role, the elfin Zoe Wanamaker mopes around in a brown coat that must be a man's extra-large (it's her father's, no doubt) and wipes her nose with a cuff so long it obscures her hand...

...The emphasis on personality comes as a surprise, because classic tragedy more often seems impersonal...

...The spot looks devastated, and it is not surprising to read, in the program, director Leveaux's note comparing the play's "cycle of violence" to the war in the Balkans...

...The taut off-Broadway production, which has been so successful it recently moved to a larger theater, is directed by Derek Anson Jones...

...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...

...And certainly the deliberately guarded bitterness of Electra and her long-lost brother Orestes (Michael Cumpsty), and their refusal to consider their mother's point of view (Clytemnestra killed her husband because he had sacrificed their daughter Iphigenia to the gods), seem eerily similar to the resentments described in dispatches from Bosnia and elsewhere...

...The gorgeously intellectual Wit, elementaryschool teacher Margaret Edson's remarkable first play, centers around a brilliant professor of English literature who is hospitalized with advanced ovarian cancer...

...The tragic writers believed easily in greatness just as we believe easily in meanness," the literary critic Joseph Wood Krutch wrote, describing the solemnly beautiful tragic order...