THE STAGE

...In Kopit's hands, from Mrs...

...Stilson has presumably suffered a second stroke, a fatal one, but the effect is neither one of final defeat nor of sentimental escape...

...This may seem an unusual play to have come from Arthur Kopit, but his strength-as a playwright lies in his unpredictability...

...Oh my, yes, and here it goes then out . . . there I think on . . . wings...

...Stilson or one of the other patients loses control, the words turn to gibberish which is, in fact, a kind of cute wordplay recalling the author of Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mama's Hung You in the Closet and l'm Feelin" So Sad...

...If so, my .testimony has a utilitarian value mit may send someone to the theater...

...The other, high-flying Emily Stilson must be apparent in the woman who feels her way along a sentence as though she were moving slowly out the wing of her plane...

...She moves from isolatfion to connection--with her therapist, the doctors, other patients struggling with a similar relearning process~but her final perception is that she has her own way to make...

...The clever young man who burst on the New York theatrical scene with Oh Dad in 1962 began to run down in the mid-1960s...

...So much of Wings depends on an Emily Stilson whose every hesitation, every stumble conveys not only the broken surface of communication but the frustrated mind behind it...

...Yes . . . Thank you...

...Working in and with this transformation of reality is the central metaphor of the play, the one that provides its title...

...If not, I still 15 September 1978:594 need to affirm that Constance Cummings's Mrs...

...CERALD WEALES Commonweal: 595...

...The wingwalking metaphor that a:companies her initial movement from panic to uneasy a~djustment now follows her into a new adventure...

...Although my description may give that impression, Wings is not a clinical play...

...In eighty minutes, played without an intermission, it follows Emily Stilson from her first baffled perception that-something is wrongkthe onset of a stroke---to a kind of clarity, "from fragmentation to integration," as Kopit says in a production note to the script...

...There were several plays written after Indians, bu[ they remain largely unknown, although Secrets of the Rich will be published later this Summer...

...For the audience--4or me, at least--i.t was a moment of exhilaration...

...Disoriented, unable to understand where she is or what has happened, she remains alert, aware, exasperated that doctors and nurses will not (cannot) hear or comprehend her responses...

...I know that she has had a distinguished stage career, most of it in England, but she was fixed in my mind as the priggish Ruth in the movie version of Blithe Spirit (1945...

...She forces herself into the darkness again and once free, unfrightened, she finds her way to her destination...

...As she reaches the end of her speech, there is a sudden terrifying flapping--a sound that represents the noise of the airplane on which she once performed--_and then a sudden burst of not quite intelligible Speech...

...She is lost, flying in the dark, when she sees a lighted village, an intoxicating promise of rescue which is in fac,t dangerous since there is no place to land and her attraction to the light may make her stay until her gasoline is gone and a crash inevitable...

...The sudden assured rushes of language that turn .to incomprehensibility must carry the desperate need and the promise of success...

...After the publication of The Day the Whores Came Out to Play Tennis and Other Plays (I965), an unprepossessing collection, he was silent until 1968, when lndians opened in London...

...That play with its odd combination of slapstick and pain, of history and myth, is one of the best American plays of the last dozen years, a complicated examination of the American penchant for myth-making and its effect on both the makers and the made...

...Wings is promised for Broadway in the Fall and presumably Cummings will repeat her original role...

...Anyone who has seen .that film lately knows that even then she had an expert sense of .timing and of intonation, but the demands of Coward's script do not begin to approach those of Kopit's play...

...The Yale prodtwtion will be gone by the time this review appears...

...I saw a scene of it in rehearsal at the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center a couple of years ago and found it funny, but it, like Oh, Dad and Indians, is hardly preparation for a work so clean, so tight, so enclosed as Wings...

...Although Kopit plainly deserves praise for the creation of Wings, it is impossible to do justice to the Yale Repertory Theatre production of the play without commen, ting on the rema.rkable performance of Constance Cummings as Mrs...

...Occasionally, when Mrs...

...Stilson is one of the most intelligent, most moving performances I have ever seen on stage...

...Stilson's point of view, the hospital routine becomes a poetic evocation of separation, at times menacing, comic, strangely beneficent...

...When I set off to see Wings, I carried an image of Cummings that was more than thirty years old...

...Images of flight and wing-walking come all through the play, sometimes in a fragmentary way, sometimes sustained until the invasion of outside noises'., outside demands route her attempts to feel her way into the memories on which her damaged brain has a tenuous hold...

...The clutter of movement, sound, light, color that surrounds her begins to sort itself out, to take on recognizable shapes, and she begins to perceive the distance between the words that come from her mouth and their images inside her head, and to build the bridges that make communication possible...

...The play ends in a monologue in which her present situation, her present struggle becomes flight...

...Stilson, we learn, was once a barnstorming pilot, a performer who walked ,the wings of a plane...