By Jim Rutter
FOR THE INQUIRER
Opera depicts tragedy. American musicals, for the most part, show sappy, silly stories of young lovers stumbling through courtship.
Composer Jeffrey Lunden’s and writer Arthur Perlman’s musical adaptation of Arthur Kopit’s play Wings
— now in a heartbreaking production at the Media Theatre — takes a different tack by starting with the tragic to recount a remarkable story of resilience and recovery.
Former aviatrix Emily (Ann Crumb) has suffered a stroke. She wakes up in a hospital, her mental clarity intact but with little ability to transform her thoughts into speech.
Addressed by a doctor and nurses as if she were a child, she vents her frustration. Most of her journey takes place internally as she struggles to recognize her children, regain her mental faculties, and return to normal life. As I said, darker fare.
Crumb’s dusky soprano pulls the lyrics from the recesses of her damaged consciousness, where agony lingers in muted syllables and garbled words. Her acting equals her singing; she flails a hand against a thigh and cocks her head from side to side as she struggles through simple sentences. And yet, when speaking or singing in the echo chamber of her mind, her voice sparkles with lucidity and a beauty that inverts the horror of her condition.
Lunden’s operatic score contains few melodies, and as Crumb sang one tortured tune after another, the audience didn’t seem to know whether or when to applaud. They should have screamed — I sat rapt, mesmerized by Crumb’s performance.
Under Jesse Cline’s admirable direction, this chamber musical fills the Media’s large stage. A series of shifting panels form both the institutional health-care bureaucracy and the damaged labyrinth of Emily’s mind. Troy Martin O’Shea’s lighting shrouds the stage in an early fog and brightens only in step with the progress of Emily’s mental recovery. Cline’s commitment to the subject matter never wavers; he recognizes the power of this dark, near-tragic tale and refuses to inject undeserved moments of sentiment or false hope.
And why should he? People suffer strokes; Kopit’s father recovered from one and inspired the original play. If it is the job of theater to hold up a mirror, then once in a while that reflection must render the grotesque. In Wings, the Media offers us an opportunity: If we are not afraid to look, this compelling production and Crumb’s chilling performance will transfix our gaze long enough to render something beautiful out of tragedy.
***
Through Feb. 26 at the Media Theatre, 104 E. State St., Media. Tickets: $44-$49. 610-891-0100 or www.mediatheatre.org
Howard Shapiro reviews and writes about theater for The Inquirer, and has been on staff since 1970. He's had many posts at the newspaper, including cultural arts editor and editor of the Weekend section. He's twice been the editor of the Travel section, for which he writes frequently. He began writing theater criticism a decade ago, and has been a Nieman Fellow at Harvard, an Internews fellow in Greece, and a fellow at the National Endowment for the Arts' Journalism Institutue in Theater and Musical Theater, where Robert Brustein was among his mentors. He teaches arts criticism and travel writing at Temple University, and is Broadway critic for the NPR-affliated stations of the Classical Network.
Toby Zinman's night job since 2006 is theater critic for the Inquirer. She also is a contributing writer for Variety and American Theatre magazine. Her day job: Prize-winning prof at UArts, author of four books about four playwrights (Rabe, McNally, Miller, Albee), and doer of scholarly deeds (winner of five NEH grants, Fulbright lecturer at Tel Aviv University, visiting professor in China). Her 'weekend' job as a travel writer provides adventure: dogsledding in the Yukon, ziplining in Belize, walking coast-to-coast across England, and cowboying in the Australian Outback.
Wendy Rosenfield has been writing freelance features and theater reviews for The Inquirer since 2006. She was theater critic for the Philadelphia Weekly from 1995 to 2001, after which she enjoyed a five-year baby-raising sabbatical. She also writes the ArtsJournal blog Drama Queen. She was 2009 and 2010 Guest Critic for the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival's Region II National Critics Institute, a 2008 NEA Fellow in Theater and Musical Theater, and a participant in the Bennington Writer's Workshop. A graduate of Bennington College, she is inching toward a Master's degree in Liberal Arts at the University of Pennsylvania. She also is a fiction writer, was proofreader to a swami, publications editor for the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, and a Brownie Girl Scout troop leader.
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