Unfortunately, Ms. Nixon's acting is part of what's wrong with the production, for she plays Vivian Bearing, the austere, loveless scholar of 17th-century poetry around whose terrible plight "Wit" revolves, as though she were a precocious schoolgirl rather than a full-grown, forbiddingly chilly intellectual.

WSJ: Wit | The Motherf**cker With the Hat | Into the (Spot)light | Theater Reviews by Terry Teachout