The play takes place in the recent past and the foreseeable future, on Earth, and "not earth." A woman named Veronica, who is a recent suicide, has to go back to the world of the living to cleanse her “brown tweedy aura” and learn the values of life. She finds herself in Bardo, a Tibetan Buddhist netherworld and the place where you wait to be reincarnated. She is not enthusiastic. All she's interested in is dying again, and as soon as possible. But her perky Indian spirit guide Maryamma insists that she go back to earth, again and again, and it is all for her own good. She is persistently pessimistic and cranky and the other spirits dub her Miss Witherspoon—the kind of name you'd associate with a grumpy old English lady in an Agatha Christie novel.
Production history
The play was commissioned by the McCarter Theatre, Princeton, New Jersey, and premiered there on September 9, 2005, running to October 16, 2005. Miss Witherspoon premiered Off-Broadway at Playwrights Horizons in association with McCarter Theatre on November 29, 2005, and closed on January 1, 2006. Directed by Emily Mann, the cast starred Kristine Nielsen as Veronica, Mahira Kakkar as her Indian guide Maryamma, and Linda Gravatt, Jeremy Shamos and Colleen Werthmann in a variety of supporting roles. This is the same cast as at the McCarter Theatre. The play was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for 2006; there was no award given that year. Subsequent productions include:
Bug Theater, Denver, on September 4, 2015, with Gina Walker as Miss Witherspoon and Rekha Ohal as Maryamma.
Critical reception
, in his review of the 2005 production for the New York Times, wrote: "As it pursues the afterlife and later lives of its title character, "Miss Witherspoon" retreads territory that Mr. Durang has charted more sharply before, from family pathology to theological perversity. This meandering sweep dilutes impact,....aside from a gorgeously realized opening scene that establishes its heroine's particularly obdurate form of depression....the play feels, well, earthbound in its familiar sendups of the nastiness of earthly life.... Ms. Nielsen's eyes go wide at such moments and her voice becomes a wounded bleat. That the same genuine pain underlines Mr. Durang's habitual archness is what makes him, even when he's not in top form, such an essential and affecting presence in the American theater." The CurtainUp reviewer of the 2005 production wrote: " 'Miss Witherspoon' is part fable, part stand-up comedy, part farce. It's a fable that puts a hopeful spin on the modern world's man-made and natural horrors, stand-up comedy that's roll-over with laughter funny -- and even at its most whacky and farcical, it's never witless. Despite some lapses into somewhat preachy and facile interchanges, it all adds up to a timely, stimulating, colorfully staged -- and, yes, hopeful -- ninety minutes. If you'll forgive the indulgence in word play, it's a tour-de-farce elevated to heavenly heights by tour-de-farceur Kristine Nielsen."
