After Double Tony Nods, Jan Maxwell Shares Her Flight Path in Wings

About the Author:
Jan Maxwell is nothing if not versatile. With Broadway credits ranging from A Doll’s House and Coram Boy to The Sound of Music and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, the actress is always on the lookout for a fresh challenge. Last season Maxwell appeared in not one, but two Broadway shows (The Royal Family and Lend Me a Tenor) and was nominated for not one, but two Tony Awards, bringing her total number of Tony noms up to four. In 2011 she will take on the role of Phyllis Rogers Stone in Follies at the Kennedy Center, but she's currently adding another tour-de-force performance to her resume as Emily Stilson, a former airplane wingwalker who suffers a stroke, in Second Stage's revival of Arthur Kopit’s 1980 drama Wings. Maxwell took a moment to tell Broadway.com how she prepared for such an overwhelming role, and why she feels such a responsibility to get this one right.



Wings is not your usual theater fare, on Broadway or off-Broadway. It is of a time when plays were written so you had to actually sit and take things in. Lately we've become so used to theater that sits in our lap and pats our cheek. This play was so poetic and fragmented and musical, and I think that’s what I first fell in love with. I stayed in love with it because I am continually fascinated by the brain and its tireless effort to protect us. It always finds pathways. If one pathway is blocked or if the cells die, your brain finds a way around it. For example, at the beginning of Wings, my character is delusional; she thinks she has been captured by the enemy. Her brain is protecting her after the trauma of her stroke until she can slowly begin rejuvenating. It’s quite amazing.

I was just ending with Lend Me a Tenor on Broadway when I went in to audition for Wings—I always laughingly say I get my jobs when the celebrities turn them down!—and it was quite a 180 to go from one to the other. I’d been sitting in Tenor for so long, and after being this loud, crazy, screaming Italian woman in that show, it was a gift to get to do something so different. After Tenor closed I had three weeks off, and I spent them upstate memorizing and researching.

I went to the Burke Institute in White Plains, NY, where [playwright] Arthur Kopit’s father had rehabilitated after his stroke. I met with stroke survivors who had been coming to this support group for 20 years. I also went to the Aphasia Society in New York and to NYU Hospital and talked with many, many people who had had strokes and are dealing with aphasia. It was important to me to treat this with respect. We have all of these mental facilities that we take for granted, and it’s easy to forget that our lives can change in a heartbeat. To watch somebody lose that really makes you appreciate what we have and how people are treated. A lot of these patients carry cards with them that say, “I’m not drunk, I’m not on drugs, I have aphasia,” because they have trouble remembering even basic things. It’s tragic, and every case is so different.

I spend a little over an hour on stage with stroke. And then I meet a woman who’s in her 50s who had a stroke 20 years ago and could not speak for six years but understood what everyone else was saying to her. Those kinds of things are sobering.

I also did a lot of research on the planes of Emily’s time period and on wingwalking, because Emily had been a wingwalker earlier in her life. There is a wonderful air museum in Rhinebeck, NY, that I visited, and I had actually already been up in a Curtiss Jenny, the kind of play Emily would have worked on. That plane cruises at about 60 miles an hour, so although I couldn’t actually wingwalk, I did do silly things like have my husband drive at 60 mph and put my head out of the sunroof to see what the windspeed feels like.

So, that’s what I did on my summer vacation! My husband said he wished I hadn't known about Wings so I would actually take a break, but this play is not something you phone in. I didn’t want to get it wrong.

Then you’re in the rehearsal room, and you have all this research and preparation behind you and you have to just let it all go, especially when you’re working with a director as brilliant as John Doyle. It was a fine line, because so much of the story is inside Emily’s head, and these days we have all these technical tricks at our fingertips. But my stance was always that you can’t lose the story in the technical things. I think what John has done with the mirrors and projections is just beautiful; it enhances Emily’s story instead of obliterating it.

So many people have been affected by stroke and aphasia, and I’m so grateful that people see the show and want to tell me their about their own experiences, the things that have happened in their lives. That’s what I love most of all—theater that leads to stories.