Flash: Lauren Ambrose to Play Susan Wheeler on TV [by David Lehman]

Lauren Ambrose of Six Feet Under fame has agreed to play the part of Dr. Susan Wheeler in a two-night miniseries based on Robin Cook's 1977 novel, Coma. Wheeler (pictured at right) is the author of Assorted Poems (Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2009) and such other collections as Smokes, Ledger, and Bag 'O' Diamonds. Her work has appeared in eight volumes of The Best American Poetry series. In the TV show, Susan is a medical student who works with Ellen Burstyn, now 79, at a hospital where healthy patients tumble alarmingly into unconsciousness for no apparent reason. Sounds like every hospital I know. Just as 90% of home accidents happen in your bathroom, so too the hospital is the place you are most likely to contract a disease or die. Mystery novelists factor this into their thinking. According to A & E (Arts & Entertainment), the miniseies -- which also features Richard Dreyfuss, Ellen Burstyn, James Woods, Geena Davis, and Steven Pasquale.-- is a "modern retelling" of Cook's novel -- you know, like "Hamlet" in "Mad Men" attire. According to Entertainment Weekly, which broke the story, Denzel Washington has been an inspiration for Lauren Ambrose. According to John Ashbery, "Susan Wheeler's narrative glamour finds occasions in unlikely places: hardware stores, Herodotus, Hollywood Squares, Flemish paintings, green stamps, and echoes of archaic and cyber speech. What at first seems cacophonous comes in the end to seem invested with a mournful dignity." In the TV show, Wheeler attends a reading Ashbery gives at the New School on West 12th Street in New York City. Archie Goodwin is in the audience. Nero Wolfe is in the brownstone cultivating orchids and tearing up Webster's unspeakable Third. In this very room Susan Wheeler has channeled Quentin Metsys, the fifteenth century Flemish painter, whose master work "The Money Lender and His Wife" hangs in the Louvre and whose surname is "system" spelled backward. Inspired by Ashbery, Wheeler's poem won the contest. Richard Howard picked it. The real Susan Wheeler teaches at Princeton. The fake Susan Wheeler is like "Denzel on a mission," said Lauren Ambrose. The real Susan Wheeler's birthday is tomorrow, July 16, and we hope it will be a very happy one. This is not the first adaptation of the Robin Cook novel. Does Dr. Susan Wheeler figure in the Coma of 1978 (Michael Crichton's movie), and, if so, who played her? "The Coma of 1978" -- now there's a title a poet can do something with.-- DL