He wouldn't have been happy if he'd found him. The old Maggio had sunken eyes, lank hair, a body whittled wraith-thin by years of cystic fibrosis. Personal transformations always lake some gelling used to, and in this case, the change has been nothing short of miraculous.
On April 27, 1991, in a tortuous 13-hour operation at St. Louis's Barnes Hospital, the 41-year-old director's failing lungs were replaced with those of a 19-year-old accident victim. Suddenly Maggio could breathe easily, climb stairs and lift weights. His professional life too was revitalized: To direct Wings, the story of a former airplane wing walker who suffers a stroke, Maggio has drawn heavily on his own ordeal. The play, which opened off-Broadway in March after a much praised run in Chicago, marks the first time in years that he has felt able to give his all to his work. "The operation was such a gift," he says. "How many people get to start over like that?"
Unlike many patients with cystic fibrosis—the most common, fatal genetic disease that primarily affects the respiratory and digestive tracts—Maggio had few symptoms until he was 12, when doctors diagnosed a chronic inflammation of the bronchial tubes. He tested negative for cystic fibrosis, and during his remaining childhood years in Chicago—where his father was a police commander and his mother a part-time secretary—he required only periodic therapy and antibiotics. Graduating from the University of Arizona with a drama degree, he married and divorced once before settling down in Chicago with wife Julie Jackson, a costume designer, in 1978. He went on to parlay regional theater jobs into an associate directorship at the Goodman Theatre, where he has become one of Chicago's most respected directors.
But the disease was slowly, steadily impairing his life. By early 1990 he was frequently hospitalized and could no longer walk far or hoist his and Julie's adopted son, Ben, now 8, to his shoulders. In 1986 a pulmonary specialist finally diagnosed cystic fibrosis, though the disease hadn't shown up on the standard test, in which perspiration induced by an electric charge is examined for high salt content. "The minute the doctor put a label on it, it was depressing because it is a terminal disease," says Julie.
By the summer of 1990 Maggio's luck was almost out. He was scheduled to direct at the New York Shakespeare Festival, but the flight proved so taxing that he had to be hooked up to the aircraft's emergency oxygen system. He pulled out of the play, returned to Chicago and began looking for a transplant program. In December he was accepted at Barnes. His surgeon, Joel Cooper, had performed the first successful double-lung transplant in 1986 in Toronto. By January Maggio was bedridden. Two months later the family moved to St. Louis to wait for a donor.
When the call finally came, "I wasn't any more nervous than I would have been if I'd been blown into space on a moon shot," says Maggio, laughing grimly. "You're going to come back or you're not going to come back." Cooper had told him that his chances of surviving five years after the transplant were about 50-50; without it, they were virtually nil. "Michael," says Cooper, "had only a few months to live."
The operation proved more grueling than Cooper had imagined. First, the donor lungs seemed to be deteriorating rapidly, and Cooper didn't believe Maggio would survive until another donor was found. Once the operation began, the surgeon was taken aback by the degree of scarring he found. "Michael's was the worst I've ever seen," he says. "The entire led lung was stuck to his heart, which made it extraordinarily difficult to see what to cut." Halfway through the procedure, Cooper stopped by the waiting room to talk to Julie, who was staring at the clock, her book and knitting untouched, "if the right lung is anything like the left, we're in trouble," he told her.
Fortunately, the doctor's fears weren't realized. Several hours later, Maggio finally awoke in intensive care—and tried to give his parents, who had driven from Chicago, a thumbs up. For days afterward he passed in and out of consciousness, his mind muddled by painkillers. "I talked to myself really strangely, lie remembers. "I use some of those images in the first minutes of Wings, after the wing walker has her stroke."
He left the hospital after a month, feeling battered but hopeful. When he was strong enough, he and Julie went through their modest, wood-frame home and banished all reminders of his illness. "The first thing to go was this big armchair where I sat for hours and did my lung treatments," Maggio says. "We painted things, Julie bought new towels. We treated this as if someone had died."
Someone had—and he was now being reborn. In five months Maggio gained 35 pounds and with them an affinity for Armani suits. He had always been "Michael"; now he called himself Mike. He even began speaking differently. "He no longer has to gasp for breath and has more modulation and uses more adjectives," says Julie. "I think I didn't just gel my donor's lungs," says Maggio, who knows only his donor's age. "I got his ambition, his drive, his libido, his spirit—everything."
When a friend sent him the Wings libretto in October 1991, Maggio knew it was the perfect reentry vehicle. "I've become much more spiritual," he says, "and Wings is about transcendence." The earthly task of staging its hospital scenes, though, proved painful. "To see that little table that goes next to you with the water pitcher on it gave me the creeps," Maggio says. "When you're in the hospital, that little table becomes your universe. But basically, I think my experiences helped me ground Wings." Many critics have agreed. "Maggio exercises a masterful control over the production," declared The New York Times's David Richards. "He understands [wing walker Emily Stilson] intuitively."
Maggio's longterm prognosis remains uncertain. "He is not immune to rejection," says Cooper. "You can go three or four years and suddenly gel an episode." Even as he plans future directing projects ("Every brain disorder play that's been written is on my doorstep," he says), Maggio knows the facts. "I think hidden underneath the surface (if people like myself is the fear that you can be sick again," he says. That noted, Mike Maggio still can't stop smiling. "I've been given this gift, and I plan to take care of it," he says. "Life is really, really good."
KIM HUBBARD
GIOVANNA BREU in Chicago
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- Giovanna Breu.
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