Wings by Arthur Kopit

First published: 1978

First produced: 1977, as a radio play; 1978, at the Yale Repertory Theatre, New Haven, Connecticut

Type of plot: Expressionist

Time of work: The 1970’s

Locale: A hospital and a convalescent hospital

Principal Characters:

• Mrs. Emily Stilson, a woman suffering a stroke
• Amy, her physical therapist

The Play

Wings is an attempt to portray the world as it appears to a person who has just suffered a stroke. Spoken thoughts, recorded voices, and fragmented images all help to create the chaotic perceptions of the leading character’s mind. The “Prelude” to Wings begins with a simple picture: a cozy armchair in a pool of light with the sound of a clock ticking in the darkness. The lights fade, and when they return an elderly woman, Emily Stilson, is sitting in the armchair reading a book. The ticking sound is louder than before. Suddenly, Mrs. Stilson looks up and a portion of the setting disappears into the darkness. She tries to continue reading, and the clock skips a beat. The clock stops, and Mrs. Stilson drops her books and stares into space. The lights go to black.

Next a collage of images and sounds fills the stage. These consist of the images that Mrs. Stilson perceives, the sounds that surround her, and the words she thinks and speaks. The author clearly states that the particular order of these images and sounds will be developed in rehearsal. Visual images include dazzling whiteness, explosions of color, mirrors, and partial glimpses of doctors, nurses, and hospital equipment. The sounds include wind, random city noises, a siren “altered to resemble a woman screaming,” incomprehensible questions, and endless echoing. At the same time, Mrs. Stilson’s voice is heard questioning, reacting to her visions, describing her physical sensations, and attempting to determine a rational order.

The chaos fades to reveal Mrs. Stilson in a chair surrounded by darkness. Act 1, “Catastrophe,” depicts her struggle to overcome the effects of the stroke. She struggles with her sense of isolation and her inability to identify clearly the sounds and images that surround her. In broken speech interspersed with moments of clarity and some totally incomprehensible series of words, she attempts to create order out of the chaos. Gradually the outside world begins to take form, and Mrs. Stilson exclaims, “Oh my God! Now I understand! THEY’VE GOT ME!”

In a series of short scenes, Mrs. Stilson gradually is able to piece together some sense of her world, although speech is still impossible and information is presented too randomly and rapidly for her to discern clear meanings. Struggling to explain her condition and her surroundings, she comes to the conclusion that she was flying a plane and crashed.

A doctor appears to work with Mrs. Stilson, asking her simple questions that she answers with a puzzling combination of correct answers and total nonsense. She begins to think that people are deliberately misleading her, and she becomes aware that her speech is muddled. “Everything I speak is wronged. SOMETHING HAS BEEN DONE TO ME!” In a moment of rage she briefly speaks with total clarity.

A therapist, Amy, begins to work with her. Mrs. Stilson can now manage to communicate, although sentences are still oddly organized and words sometimes escape her. Amy urges her to talk about the past, and Mrs. Stilson remembers a time when she flew planes and walked on the wings. In a dream, she remembers those days and is surprised to find herself in tears.

Act 2, subtitled “Exploration,” begins in the recreation room of a rehabilitation center. Mrs. Stilson enters and struggles to maintain a line of thought through the interruptions of the outside stimuli. Amy is still with her, but now Mrs. Stilson is more aware of her own condition and begins to doubt if she will improve much. She wanders through a maze of passageways, encountering a series of voices ranging from intellectual, scientific discussions to simple questions and answers. This section concludes with a single musical tone as Mrs. Stilson recognizes that everyone there is just like her. Mrs. Stilson is introduced to some other patients in a group therapy situation. Each of them is at a different stage of progress, and Mrs. Stilson becomes aware of the work it will take to improve. For the first time, she acknowledges thoughts of death.

Further therapy with Amy provides more improvement. Mrs. Stilson relates an adventure in which her son came to visit and took her out to see airplanes. She tells of sitting in the cockpit of the plane and having her hands know how to fly without any conscious awareness on her part. She says that she was crying “and then all at once—it remembered everything!” After a long pause, she adds “But now it doesn’t.”

Mrs. Stilson’s improvement is matched by a growing rapport with Amy, and the two women share moments of laughter as well as the struggle. One day, as they share a quiet moment outside, Mrs. Stilson tells of a dream in which a person—she does not know if it was a man or woman—came over to her bed and whispered “Emily . . . we’re glad you changed your mind,” and then left. At that point, she claims, she left her body, floating on the ceiling and looking down on herself lying in the bed.

Abruptly, Amy recedes into the darkness and Mrs. Stilson recognizes that she is somewhere else. In fact, she is in a plane. She asks herself, “Is it . . . remembering?” She concludes that “No . . . no, I’m simply there again!” She is flying a plane, and she is lost. She sees faint lights below and drops down searching for a place to land. She finds a tiny town, totally deserted. She circles, knowing that fuel is short and that she may crash. She circles, afraid to leave and go back into empty blackness. She knows she must leave and pulls the nose up with great effort and finds herself in the dark, and not even scared. “God, but it was wonderful! Awful scary sometimes, though!”

Amy appears in the distance calling for Emily. A sudden sound is heard, Mrs. Stilson gasps, and Amy disappears. Mrs. Stilson pauses, says, “Thank you,” and the lights go to black.

Dramatic Devices

Wings employs a wide range of dramatic devices to portray the inner experience of the leading character. The structure of the play is fluid, with no clear demarcation between scenes. It allows the audience to experience Mrs. Stilson’s temporal and physical world, in which time is no longer linear and in which space is no longer discrete. She moves without warning forward and backward in time and “discovers” herself in a different space rather than consciously moving from place to place. At the same time, the play maintains its cohesiveness by projecting a fundamental sense of progression. There is a forward movement in time, but it is not a direct path. At the same time, Arthur Kopit does not allow the play to become random or structureless. He interweaves some scenes that are traditional representational drama with people interacting in normal ways while time and space remain discrete. Such scenes occur with more regularity as the play progresses, paralleling Mrs. Stilson’s recovery.

Much of the play’s effectiveness is accomplished through the use of set, lighting, and sound. Kopit describes the set as a system of black scrim panels that move silently and easily to create featureless corridors. Some are mirrored to multiply and refract images. These panels serve at times to surround Mrs. Stilson in a black void. At other times, characters appear behind the panels, clearly separated from Mrs. Stilson’s world. Alternatively, the panels can open to provide a sense of being outdoors. The silent speed and ease is essential in maintaining the fluidity of time and space the play requires. Kopit’s use of these devices is clearly demonstrated near the end of act 1. A doctor and nurse appear behind the screens, separated from Mrs. Stilson and yet acting as though they were directly beside her. While the doctor and nurse struggle to calm the “physical” presence which the audience cannot see, the audience views the “inner” Mrs. Stilson in front of the screens.

Lighting is used dramatically in the opening scene in which Mrs. Stilson’s chair is separated by a void of darkness from the table which would normally sit next to it, thus emphasizing her separation from the physical world. Lighting also allows objects and people to appear and disappear as they move in and out of Mrs. Stilson’s consciousness. A symbolic use of light is seen in the presence of a cool, blue light to indicate Mrs. Stilson’s “dream” or “memory” episodes.

Sound is used to produce a further sense of Mrs. Stilson’s fragmented perception. At one point, a “cacophony of sounds heard from all around, both live and from the speakers” is used to convey Mrs. Stilson’s impressions as she is moved through the hospital. At other times, music, single tones, the sound of bells, and a sound of “something flapping rapidly” are used to indicate fleeting impressions and awarenesses. All elements are well integrated with the spoken dialogue. Far more than most plays, however, Wings is dependent on the full range of theatrical tools, and the use of each element is essential to the production.

Critical Context

Arthur Kopit has generally been considered a part of the Theater of the Absurd movement from his first commercial success, Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mama’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feelin’ So Sad: A Pseudoclassical Tragifarce in a Bastard French Tradition (pr., pb. 1960). In the final moment of the play, Madame Rosepettle enters the bedroom to find that her son, Jonathan, has just killed the young woman who attempted to seduce him as he lay draped over his father’s corpse. Surveying this chaos, she asks “What is the meaning of this?” The impossibility of any reasonable answer is precisely the absurdist’s point.

The failure of language as a means of communication is introduced in the character of Jonathan, who cannot speak without stammering. This issue is taken to an extreme in The Day the Whores Come out to Play Tennis (pr., pb. 1965) as a group of men aimlessly debate methods of getting rid of the women who have taken over the tennis courts of their country club. Finally, in Wings, Mrs. Stilson questions the very structure and validity of language.

The question of personal identity or authenticity is pursued in Chamber Music (pb. 1965). A group of women incarcerated in an insane asylum meet to take action to curb a series of hostile incidents. In the cast list, the women are identified only by external qualities, and the question of personal identity is further complicated by the fact that each woman has chosen to role-play a historical heroine. In Indians (pr. 1968), William Cody struggles to distinguish himself from his professional identity as Buffalo Bill, and Sitting Bull fears that he has become the white man’s image of him. Indians also addresses this issue on a national scale. Kopit questions basic American myths of altruism, moral superiority, and technological prowess by showing that those very qualities were used to justify the destruction of the Native Americans. Although early reviews do not mention it, later critical studies have noted the direct analogy to the American experience in Vietnam.

Kopit’s determined aversion to representational drama corroborates his perception of the stage as a place for exaggeration and grotesquery. He is influenced by Brechtian concepts in which the aim is to alienate the audience to the degree that they will not identify with the characters but will be forced to consider the issues or ideas.

Although Kopit utilizes many techniques that have been labeled “absurdist,” it is essential that such a tag not place arbitrary boundaries on his work. Although he shares some elements of absurdist thought, Kopit’s plays do not accept the negativity or passivity that so often characterize absurdist drama. As in the case of Mrs. Stilson, there is a base recognition of personal identity, an acceptance of personal responsibility, and a positive movement toward integration and understanding.

Sources for Further Study

Auerbach, Doris. Sam Shepard, Arthur Kopit and the Off-Broadway Theater. Boston: Twayne, 1982.

Kopit, Arthur. “The Vital Matter of Environment.” Theatre Arts 45 (April, 1961): 12-13.

Myers, Norman J. “Two Kinds of Alaska: Pinter and Kopit Journey Through Another Realism.” Pinter Review, 1992-1993, 11-19.

Rose, Carol. “Killing Pain in the End Beds.” In Plays of Impasse. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983.

Secrest, Meryle.“‘Out West’ with Kopit.” Washington Post, April 20, 1969, p. K1.

Weales, Gerald. “Arthur Kopit.” In Contemporary Dramatists. 6th ed. Detroit: St. James, 1999.