Brain Crash

By Gerald Clarke

WINGS by Arthur Kopit

A serious illness is a prison from which there are only two exits: recovery or death. Arthur Kopit's new play Wings is a message smuggled out from that terrifying Gulag inhabited by a stroke victim. At the beginning of this excellent production now visiting Manhattan's Public Theater from the Yale Repertory Theater, an elderly woman sits reading in an easy chair, a clock ticking at her side. Suddenly the clock stops, the lamp goes out, and there are loud noises. Mrs. Stilson (Constance Cummings) has had a stroke.

When she finds herself in the hospital, she cannot understand what happened; and, though she tells her thoughts to the audience, the doctors cannot understand her. At first she thinks they are deliberately refusing to listen. Then Mrs. Stilson, who was once a stunt pilot, realizes the truth: her wings have failed her. "As near as I can figure," she says, "I was in my brain and crashed." Slowly, like a child, she learns the words for ev eryday things and slowly recovers until, at the end, she suffers another stroke and escapes for good.

As Kopit has written it, Wings is more a poetic vision than a full-scale play, and Mrs. Stilson tells her story in one act of an hour and 40 minutes. It is a peculiarly compelling vision, however, and Cummings, 68, making one of her too rare American appearances, gives a brilliant performance in what is almost a one-woman show. She gives each gesture the perfect size and commands every nuance; John Madden has directed with proper astringency. Wings is in every sense a high flyer.

Gerald Clarke

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