Margaret Edson has just written one play in her life, the brilliant Wit, now receiving its Broadway premiere a mere seventeen years after it was first produced and went on to win nearly every theater award, including the Pulitzer Prize. This new incarnation could well result in another accolade: a Tony for Best Revival of a Play.

Anyone who saw the brilliant Kathleen Chalfant in the original Off-Broadway production might wonder whether Cynthia Nixon would be as effective in the role of Vivian Bearing, a poetry professor suffering from Stage IV ovarian cancer. But while Nixon offers a quite different, less officious interpretation than her predecessor, she is no less affecting.

Her character acts as the play’s narrator, directly addressing the audience in telling the story of the diagnosis of her affliction and her subsequent agreement to an experimental chemotherapy treatment that will not cure her but rather provide much needed data for the medical researchers handling her case.

It’s grim stuff, to be sure, but the play beautifully balances pathos with humor in its depiction of the emotional and mental anguish that Bearing undergoes as she becomes little more than a research subject for her doctors. Along the way, flashbacks reveal her earlier life, from when she was a young girl hungry for knowledge to her distinguished career as a professor specializing in the works of the 17th century John Donne--famous, of course, for the line “Death be not proud.”

The playwright once worked in the cancer unit of a research hospital, and clearly knows the terrain well. She beautifully captures the unthinking casual breeziness of the doctors, including one young researcher (Greg Keller), who used to be Bearing’s student and who treats her with the same rigorous exactitude that she applied in her classroom.

There is no shortage of heartbreaking scenes, most notably one towards the end involving a visit to the dying Bearing by an elderly woman (a superb Suzanne Bertish) who was once her professor and who climbs into bed with her and reads her a children’s story while gently stroking her hair.

Under the sensitive direction of Lynne Meadow, the supporting players--including Michael Countryman as a doctor supervising the case and Carra Patterson as a friendly nurse and the only person who actually treats the patient as a person—deliver sterling work. But it is Nixon, perfectly conveying her character’s combination of emotional reserve, acerbic wit and brilliant intellectualism—“It’s highly educational, I am learning how to suffer,” she remarks at one point about her ordeal—who powers the production. Her sublime, deeply affecting portrayal, for which she bares both body and soul, is a revelation.   

Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, 261 W. 47th St. 212-239-6200. www.Telecharge.com. Through March 11.