'This skillfull...stunning production has elevated the theatre to the highest level of artistic excellence...not to be missed...world-class... first-rate...with an astonishing cast of fine actors. BRAVO!

Kim Crow as Dr. Bearing is a transcendent artist and consummate performer. She gives a performance of such power and depth, it takes your breath away. This is a role that demands 100-percent-plus from any actress who tackles it--from the red baseball cap that covers her hairless head to the hospital gowns that cover her naked body. And anyone playing this role is laid emotionally bare as well.

The incomparable Crow brings this kind of commitment to the part, revealing the very essence of her being as she shares her inner self with the audience. She plays the audience's emotions like an instrument. taking us exactly where she wants us, making us feel precisely what she wants us to feel. We believe her, we share her wit, her pain, her courage and, eventually her death. This is a gut-wrenching performance for both the actor and the audience -- an evening you will never forget.'

Center Stage, Marsha Wagner, The Islander, Week of March 23-29, 2001 Click here for complete review

Florida Repertory Theatre bravely takes on difficult issues

'Wow.'

That was all this reviewer could say after picking her mouth up off the floor following the stunning conclusion of 'Wit' Friday by the Florida Repertory Theatre at the historic Arcade Theatre in downtown Fort Myers.

But 'wow' is far too simple a word to convey the layers and depths of meaning in this vocabulary-rich play, so I'll have to do better. Here it goes:

Hats off to Kim Crow, who portrays college professor Vivian Bearing, an intimidatingly intelligent and quick-witted woman who is in the final stages of ovarian cancer. Crow is remarkable as she lives out Bearing's last two hours of life after being admitted to a hospital in the 1999 Pulitzer Prize-winning play, which is being presented for the first time on a Southwest Florida stage.

Crow and the rest of the cast, under the direction of Pamela Hunt, do justice to a remarkable script by Margaret Edson a fabric woven with the symbolic, sophisticated poetry of John Donne. By show's end on opening night, Crow was so emotionally spent, she appeared on the edge of tears as she took her final bow to a standing ovation.

To simply recite the eloquent, rhythmical dialogue full of huge words would be a feat. To commit volumes of that dialogue to mind and memory so one can pour oneself into acting takes incredible skill and talent, and Crow does it with flourish. Her transitions are smooth and effective as she shifts easily between narrating events to the audience and interacting with other actors during every scene of the nearly two-hour play, which runs without intermission.

Crow's powerful performance ...as Bearing uses Donne's 17th century Holy Sonnets to parallel her experience and to spit in the face of death itself. As she lays on an examining table with her feet in stirrups, her soul naked, death knocking on her door, she battles back by reciting angrily to the ceiling: 'Death be not proud, though some have called thee Mighty and dreadfull, for, thou art not soe . . .'

Her diction is clear; her sentiments strong and distinct throughout the play as she fluctuates from anger, to humor, to intellectual snobbery, to submission, to disgust, to fear, and back again.

At play's open, Crow's Bearing tells the audience how the show will end.

We know she will die.

We just don't know how incredible and revealing the end will be.'

Beth Francis, Naples Daily News, March 21, 2001 for full review click here