Word: stilson
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...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...
...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...
When a St. Louis newspaper man named Stilson Hutchins first came to Washington in 1877 to found the city's sixth daily newspaper, he intended his fledgling Post to be a Democratic daily. The paper was certainly Democratic--it called then-president Rutherford B. Hayes, a Republican, "the bogus president"--and it was moderately successful until Hutchins sold it in 1889. But under a succession of owners, The Post became more and more sensational and relied on the wire services and the New York papers for most of its serious news coverage...