Wednesday, January 29, 2014

Where does Emily Stilson think she is while in the hospital?

The early part of the play Wings deals with Emily's massive stroke and its deeply traumatic aftermath. As such, her connection to the outside world has been unceremoniously shattered. All of a sudden, nothing seems to make any sense. Her frail, distorted mind is trapped in a vortex of fragmented thoughts, at once wild and disconnected. Somehow Emily needs to unify these disparate bursts of memory and thought to re-establish a connection with a world she no longer truly recognizes.
To a certain extent, she does this, but not in a coherent way. She constructs a world out of the past, out of the fragile shards of memory that now constitute the only semblance of order in her radically disrupted life. Inevitably, it is her previous life as an aviatrix that rises from the depths of her subconscious to shine through the shattered remnants of her conscious mind. Emily looks around suspiciously at the doctors and nurses as they ask her a series of questions, trying to establish her state of mind. She comes to feel as if she's been shot down behind enemy lines and that the hospital's medical staff are her interrogators. Their questioning is standard medical procedure in the case of a stroke victim, but to Emily in her current state, they're giving her the third degree, demanding top secret information that she's determined not to provide.

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