Kathleen Chalfant
Understanding a patient's emotions during and after a life-threatening experience is one of the most important and humane aspects of practicing medicine, yet it can also be one of the most difficult to understand. There are few ways to comprehend that experience without having personally lived it, or cared for a loved one during that time.
On Thursday, March 2, Weill Cornell faculty and students got a closer look at the patient experience through the prism of theater during a dramatic reading of the play "Wings," staged in Uris Auditorium by Weill Cornell Medical College Artist-in-Residence Kathleen Chalfant and a cast of five players.
The play, written by Arthur Kopit, explores the interior world of Emily Stilson, a former wing-walking aviatrix from whose profession the play takes its title. At the beginning of the play Stilson suffers a stroke and over the course of the next three acts she struggles to understand both the nature and cause of her resulting neurological damage. Although Kopit met and interviewed a former wing-walker during his research, the central character and her medical conditions are a composite of several stroke victims, each with unique neurological and linguistic symptoms.
A primary effect of Stilson's stroke is jargon aphasia, the utterance of meaningless phrases, either neologisms or incoherently arranged known words. The barrier created by Stilson's inability to communicate is a continuing motif and the incoherent phrases that make up much of the play's dialogue become a central metaphor for the patient's confusion, terror and paranoia.
In his opening remarks, Kopit called the play "an homage to speech therapists," but he also emphasized that the play was in no way a case study. Rather, he was looking to articulate the emotional truth of a stroke victim and the often stark isolation that results from their condition, he said. Kopit has written that "Wings" is "a work of speculation informed by fact," a work that is based on research and his own experiences with stroke victims and the clinical staff who treat them.
Originally a radio play, the staged reading was produced as part of the Medical College's Humanities and Medicine Program. Established in 1999, the program seeks to broaden students' understanding of the patient experience through an appreciation of the arts and humanities.
"I don't know whether it is possible to truly understand, in the most intimate way, the profound experience of being a patient with a serious illness, unless you have either been such a patient, or the loved one of such a patient," says Debra Gillers, associate dean of academic affairs and the program's director. "Students, as a group, are relatively young and very healthy and the majority have had neither experience," she says. "But I believe that the insights that come from an appreciation of literature, art and music are another means to gain that awareness, and make us more human as well."
"Wings" is just one of a number of Humanities and Medicine presentations to which actress Kathleen Chalfant has contributed her talent. She ushered in the inauguration of the program in 1999 with a reading of "Wit," the Pulitzer Prize winning play by Margaret Edson about an English professor dying of ovarian cancer, a role for which Chalfant received an Obie Award, a Drama Desk Award, a Drama League Award and an Outer Critics Circle Award.
Chalfant has also been designated Weill Cornell's first Artist-in-Residence, a position that evolved in recognition of her past and ongoing contributions to the Humanities and Medicine program, including playing a major role in the production and performance of several of the programs presented this year. In addition, in a three-session elective, Chalfant guided 10 students through critical readings of "Wit" as part of "The Art of Observation: The Patient's Experience," a class designed to give students greater insight into the patient's experience through the study of literature. Students took on various roles in the play and discussed the relationship between the patient and other characters and, together with Professor of Clinical Medicine Dr. Jeffrey Groeger, had the opportunity to talk with a patient undergoing cancer treatment as well as with physicians and staff who specialize in the care of patients with cancer.
Chalfant views both art and medicine as uniquely intertwined around similar values. "I believe that art is one of the defining characteristics of human beings—the making of it and the participating in it," she says. "I have found that the compassion that brings physicians to their profession also makes them uniquely open to the experience of art."
Photo courtesy of DGRW Talent Inc.