The audience soars in 'Wings' and 'Spirit Control'
One of the best things about watching dance is the feeling that it's running away with our bodies.
You know what I mean. You're sitting like a lump, in a theater seat or in front of the TV, when abruptly, mysteriously, your body seems to have been taken hold by whatever the dancer must be feeling - lurching, spinning, almost flying. Of course, you haven't moved at all.
I don't know what scientists call that. But in the dance world, this secondhand motion-emotion, this motion-by-proxy, is described as a kinesthetic sense. The feeling doesn't always happen but, when it momentarily whisks us away, it's a thrill.
Such physical empathy is much rarer in the theater, where words and stories tend to play different kinds of tricks with our heads.
Oddly enough, two recent plays - "Wings" and "Spirit Control" - find a way to use words in ways that approximate that physical reaction we get from dance. Both happen to be about characters who fly airplanes. And both, in very different ways, tap our kinesthetic sense by taking us deep into the life of their minds.
"Wings" is a revival of Arthur Kopit's 1978 drama written from the jumbled perspective of a woman who has suffered a stroke. Imagine the presumption, a virtual monologue inside the mind of a person with an impaired ability to communicate. How could that possibly work?
Well, it worked then on Broadway and, even less likely, it worked in 1992 as a chamber musical (without dancing). Now, the play has returned in an effective, though somewhat less haunting production at Second Stage Theatre.
The main character is Emily Stilson, an aviator and a wing-walker in her youth. We first see her sitting on a chair, reading. A clock ticks, tocks, ticks, then skips a beat. Our hearts skip with it. The book falls from her hands and, according to the stage directions, she stares out in terror.
With that catastrophe, we are catapulted into the dizzying life of her mind. She talks, but doctors don't understand her. She cannot find the right word for simple things. We see her as she exists in her unconscious - not a patient but a person whose sense of adventure can still puncture the horror with moments of exhilaration. She stands, imagining she is on the wing of a plane, and we feel that, too.
Two things may keep John Doyle's spare and fluid staging from being as overwhelming as the original. First, the singularity of the conceit has been upstaged by "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly," Julian Schnabel's 2007 movie told through the frustrated mind of an almost totally paralyzed stroke victim. It's hard to compete with those internal monologues on a big screen.
The other problem of the production is, paradoxically, also a major strength. Emily is played by Jan Maxwell, one of the most formidable actresses in the theater today. (She had two Tony nominations last season, one for "The Royal Family," one for "Lend Me a Tenor.") She is handsome, intelligent, shot through to her spine with the qualities Emily must have had in her youth.
The problem is that Emily, as written, was meant to be in her 70s, and Maxwell is a modern, hearty young-middle age. She could indeed have suffered a stroke, but the oddness of the occurrence keeps us from getting naturally into Kopit's question, that is, "What is it like inside?"
Beau Willimon's suspenseful new play, "Spirit Control," also begins in catastrophe. But not right away. First, we are having some fun with a couple of air traffic controllers as they balance chatter with the excruciatingly precise demands of directing landings and takeoffs.
Suddenly, Adam, the more lively and trustworthy of the men, gets a distress call from a woman alone in a Cessna after her friend, the pilot, apparently had a heart attack. Adam jumps into nail-biting action, brilliantly instructing her on landing the plane. But something goes wrong.
All that takes about a half-hour, but it speeds like a racing pulse. Willimon, however, is after more than cheap-thrill action. For the rest of the drama, we live in the mind of Adam as he struggles with the fate of the woman and how it affects the rest of his life.
Everyone in director Henry Wishcamper's production is first-rate, and Willimon, while not after profundity, is a storytelling craftsman who creates believable people we don't see every day in the theater.
But the play works this well because of Jeremy Sisto, best known as the psychotic brother in "Six Feet Under" and as a cop in the "Law & Order." Sisto plays Adam with enormous openness and strength, bringing us into his visceral emotional pain, into the flailing and falling of his delusions and his reality.
As Adam says to the woman, and later himself, "The plane is just part of your body - with wings and an engine. You're landing your body, OK? Not a plane. . . . So just let the plane lead you to the ground." And, like a dancer with just words, he flies us with him.
INFO
WINGS Second Stage Theatre, 305 W. 43rd St., $75, 212-246-4422, 2st.com
SPIRIT CONTROL Manhattan Theatre Club, 131 W. 55th St., $80, 212-581-1212, nycitycenter.org
