Imagine snow. Imagine being in snow-seeing snow, feeling snow, experiencing the magical lightness and silence of snow.
But when you reach for the word for it, for the simple word ”snow,” it is not there.
For Emily Stilson, the onetime barnstorming air show wing-walker heroine of the new Goodman Theatre studio musical production ”Wings,” the word
”snow” no longer exists. Now in her vulnerable old age, she has been robbed of it by a thief named stroke.
In the scene, perhaps the most poignant in the production, a therapist named Amy points to a snow-covered bench, and asks: ”Do you know what this is called?”
Emily says, ”Bench!”
”Very good!” says Amy. ”No, I mean what`s on top of it. (No response)
What I`m brushing off. (Still no response) What`s falling from the sky.”
(Long silence)
Finally, Emily says, ”Where do you get names from?”
”I? From in here, same as you.”
”Do you know how you do it?”
”No.”
”Then how am I supposed to learn?”
For any stroke victim, for the person who has had a significant portion of his or her brain rendered useless or dead by what physicians refer to as
”cardiovascular accident,” such dysfunctional vocabulary is just one of the maddening, terrifying frustrations of incalculably lonely everyday life-a frustration as maddening and terrifying as the loss of the ability to move hand or leg.
Many normal people confronted with stroke victims unthinkingly presume from such symptoms that they are dealing with a remnant of a person-in some very serious cases, with ”a vegetable.”
But there is a whole human being within, a true person who has only, to varying degrees, lost the ability to think in words, to communicate easily or fully-a person virtually imprisoned in his or her malfunctioning body, a person struggling valiantly or helplessly to reach out, to connect.
A person whose survival may depend wholly on making that connection.
Playwright Arthur Kopit learned this when his own father fell victim to a massive stroke in 1976. With his compelling 1978 public radio drama turned stage play ”Wings,” he attempted to explain the truth about the person within-and, with most audiences and critics, succeeded brilliantly.
In this Goodman Theatre production, which opens Monday, composer Jeffrey Lunden and lyricist Arthur Perlman have attempted to bring forth the same revelation in a musical adaptation of Kopit`s work.
With a portrayal of Emily by veteran actress Linda Stephens and direction by the Goodman`s Michael Maggio, they too have succeeded in connecting the victim and the normal world.
This is not a casually rendered opinion. Kopit based Emily on my mother, Laura Kilian.
A stage and radio actress whose professional name was Laura Leslie, she spent part of a wild and uninhibited youth as a wing-walker with air shows in the Midwest in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Her specialty, as ”The Nerve Gal,” was hanging from the undercarriage of a biplane by a silk stocking.
She suffered a stroke at the same time as Kopit`s father. They both became patients at the Burke Rehabilitation Center in White Plains, N.Y. She was paralyzed on the left side and also suffered a significant loss of speech. Kopit`s father`s case was more serious. As Kopit told me later, the man could communicate ”only with his eyes.”
While visiting his father, Kopit took to wandering the halls of the center. My brother Waldemar, a New York advertising man, had sought to cheer up my mother and remind her of her once glamorous self by enlarging and mounting old newspaper clips and pictures of her in her wing-walking days and having them hung by her bed.
Kopit noticed these and took to following her through her therapy. National Public Radio had commissioned him to write an audio play. An idea took hold, and ”Wings” followed.
The ”snow” scene is based on a recovery session in which a therapist pointed to the snowy landscape outside the window and asked my mother to tell her what season it was.
”Spring,” she said.
In eerie coincidence, though they had never before met, she had performed in his play ”Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma`s Hung You in the Closet and I`m Feelin` So Sad” at a Westchester County (N.Y.) theater. I had not met Kopit either, but was a commentator on NPR at the time his play aired.
Starring Constance Cummings as Emily, a stage version of ”Wings”
premiered at the Yale Repertory Theater in March, 1978, and went on to Washington`s Kennedy Center as well as successful runs in New York and Chicago. It was considered perhaps Kopit`s most ambitious and difficult and certainly most disturbing work.
Lunden and Perlman saw the play in Washington as young students at George Washington University and it inspired in them a desire to bring it to life one day in musical form.
Their eventual creation was brought to Maggio`s attention last year by a mutual friend. It was a work of particular meaning to Maggio, who had long suffered from a debilitating lung ailment and underwent a lung transplant last year. During his recovery, he decided upon ”Wings” as a fitting first production for his return to the theater.
”I knew it when I looked at the libretto,” he said. ”The dialogue Emily has with herself. Obviously, there`s no medical parallel, and everyone has dialogues with himself, but it`s truly intensified when you`re so isolated by any kind of debilitating illness.”
In Kopit`s stage play, the point of view shifts back and forth between Emily`s inner world, which is chaotic and frightening but linguistically understandable, and the outer hospital world, where a frequently
incomprehensible Emily exists simply as patient.
For Emily`s ”stroke speech,” Kopit employed the strange, musical burbling speech pattern of a young woman stroke victim residing at Burke at the same time.
This back and forth aspect has been dropped in the Lunden/Perlman version, and the focus is on the inner and outer world as Emily perceives it. As in the Kopit play, her mental and spiritual returnings to her experiences in the air serve as metaphor for the glories of her life, for the freedom of life we non-stroke victims take so for granted and for the awesome singleness of our individual lives in the vastness of time and space.
Maggio said he by no means views the Perlman/Lunden work as a mere
”musical adaptation.”
”I don`t think it`s a point of adding to something,” he said. ”They haven`t set out to improve upon something. You have a couple of artists who were inspired to write a new piece, in the sense that Lerner and Loew didn`t set out to improve upon `Pygmalion` (with `My Fair Lady`).”
The music, especially the lovely song about snow and the spiritually triumphant finale ”Wings,” lend an uplifting effect that enhances the humanity of the piece-gentling the rawness and shock of the Kopit work that some in the opening night audience found too disturbing to endure to the end. ”The music softens and carries it,” Maggio said.
Two keyboards, a cello and woodwind and percussion instruments provide accompaniment and highlight dramatic moments.
The Goodman show, performed in the Goodman`s 135 seat studio, is in one act and lasts an hour and 20 minutes. Joining Stephens-”I can`t think of anyone else I could cast in that part,” Maggio said-are Goodman veterans William Brown, Ora Jones, Ross Lehman and Hollis Resnik.
Both dramatic and musical versions turn on Emily`s acceptance of the terrible challenge presented her by her stroke. Many victims struggle successfully to meet this challenge.
At about the same time as Kopit`s father (who died) and my mother, Illinois Senate Majority Leader W. Russell Arrington, a most formidable man, suffered an equally crippling stroke. Though he lived on only about the same number of years as my mother, he fought his affliction and returned to a near normal life.
She gave up, living the rest of her life as a bedridden invalid in a nursing home run by a family friend on Long Island.
Li my brother feared that the excitement and stress might kill her were she to learn of the play or see it.
In 1981, after Kopit had sent me an inscribed hardcover copy of the play, I decided she should know about it, come what may. I took her the volume and read Kopit`s inscription: ”I hope I (and we) did some part of her, some essential part of her, justice.”
She glowed with life and happiness as I had not seen in years-as though she was enjoying another theatrical triumph.
Three weeks later, she died.
