Angels Fall (Critical Overview)

Critical Overview

At the time that Angels Fall was written and produced in the early 1980s, Lanford Wilson had already established himself as an exceptional dramatist with compelling Broadway plays such as The Hot l Baltimore (1973), The Fifth of July (1978), and Talley's Folley (1979). As Gerald Berkowitz notes in American Drama of the Twentieth Century, Wilson's plays, from the mid-seventies onward, had "the ability to depict the complex emotions and relationships of a group of characters through a domestic realism given a lyrical tone by a musical and poetic use of language." More than one critic has noted that Wilson's emphasis on family relations combined with lyricism and compassion evoke Tennessee Williams, a playwright Wilson deeply admired. His emphasis on the dignified struggles of ordinary people in contemporary times has lead drama critic Anne Dean, in her book Discovery and Invention: The Urban Plays of Lanford Wilson, to note that Wilson is concerned with capturing "the dramatic and poetic essence of a particular social milieu" similar to the work of Charles Dickens, whom Wilson cites as a major influence. She continues to examine these two writers' similarities, suggesting that in both their works "metaphorically heightened messages about the unhappy state of the world abound."

Probably no other play of Wilson's illustrates the polemicist side of him than Angels Fall, which depicts the incidental gathering of a group of people in a New Mexican church during a nuclear accident at a nearby uranium mine. What strikes many critics of this play is its atypical setting which might account for critics' inability to designate this play as one that fits into the schemata of Wilson settings — Midwest, New York, West Coast. However, like his other plays, the setting of the play is extremely important to the play's themes and outcomes. The church setting shelters an ensemble of characters who may not be completely shunned from society as other misfit casts he has created in plays like Hot l Baltimore but it represents, according to Thomas Adler in his article "The Artist in the Garden: Theatre Space and Place in Lanford Wilson," "an oasis whose inherent beauty has been threatened by contemporary man's idolization of technological progress at the expense of human values." In this way, as noted by Mark Busby in Lanford Wilson, the contrast of the church in the desert surrounded by the waste products of the modern age reveals a juxtaposition of the eternal past (the natural world, the spiritual world) with the temporal present (industry motivated by capitalism). This theme of past and present in conflict with each other is also a key foundation to the crises of faith that the art professor, Niles Harris, and the parish priest, Father Doherty, undergo in their inability to accept the shift in thinking that the modern world demands — that truth has become relative.

Most critics agree that Wilson's solution to this crisis of faith is found in the concept of vocation, which is offered as a solution to threat of nuclear war and ultimately death. This is seen in the passage from the New Testament that incites people to do goodwill and thus death becomes less fraught, which Father Doherty recites to the other characters. As Gene Barnett, writing in Lanford Wilson, suggests, the play's major theme is that "in finding our own profession, we are able to face death in the knowledge that life has been lived well." In this way, both the professor and priest must engage in rediscovering their abilities to teach in order to make their lives fulfilling. The "road" that is referred to in the play as first being closed and then opened act has both a literal and metaphorical meaning. In his article, "'Above Time' in the Present?: Emerson's 'Self-Reliance' and Lanford Wilson's Angels Fall," Richard Wattenberg describes the road as denoting both the route of the characters' lives as well as the course of the lives they currently lead, particularly as it refers to their work.

However, as Susan Harris Smith, in her article "Angels Fall: An American Melodrama of Beset Manhood," points out, having one's work be a solution to the environmental and political crises that nuclear technologies engender displaces one's commitment to community to that of the self. The true problem, contends Smith, is that this group "disbands for individual realization and does not coalesce around the pressing issue that should unite them permanently, namely the threat of nuclear catastrophe." As other critics have noted about Angels Fall, the play lacks any resolution and provides little redemption in relation to the epiphanies the characters' experience. What it does offer, notes Berkowitz in American Drama of the Twentieth Century, is its ability to show ordinary people enduring life, not necessarily in a triumphant way, but in a way that is reassuring.