How was Vivian’s cultural experience of death? How does it differ from your own culture’s expression of loss or mourning? Are there rituals or rites of passage that are practiced in your culture?

Vivian's story is about the final days of her life. We are told by her at the beginning of the play that she knows she will die by the time the curtain closes. Thus, these moments in her life become the dramatization of one's life's work and the reality of death bearing down and scrutinizing the life she has lived, and sacrificed for.

Vivian is a scholar of seventeenth-century poetry. She has become the leading expert in Donne's Holy Sonnets as she has committed to a lifetime of study in order to explore his work and teach it at University level. Ironically, Vivian has had no one to share her life we and we watch as she has only one visitor before her death.

At the end of the play, we see Vivian take off both of her robes and reach towards the light. The imagery shows her being freed of the burdens of life and set free into eternity.