The language of the mind losing hold of words as it drifts off to sleep was first explored by Joyce in Ulysses at the end of the Ithaca episode. But it was Beckett who, in his plays and novels, evoked states bordering on, or representing, aphasia, albeit not literally reproducing clinical cases. Kopit pushes farther in that direction [in Wings], but for all his research into and re-creation of actual defective speech by patients, he too keeps the verbiage within literary boundaries. Thus the work's master metaphor is wings, flying—symbolizing both speech winging its way from person to person and the psyche setting forth on perilous voyages into life and, eventually, out of it.

The play has many virtues…. By various verbal and visual means, Kopit achingly conveys the humiliations of a disability that isolates a mind from its peers and makes of cross-purposes a spirit-breaking cross...