When Angels Fall Flat

IVORY TOWER intellectuals have always taken flak for being out of touch with reality, and to a great extent, the criticism holds true. Anyone who's ever eaten in a Harvard dining hall, sipped tea with Derek Bok or sat in on a Government tutorial meeting knows the thrill of formulating a blueprint for a better world. Yet once the security of the Ivy League vanishes, principles often take a back seat to practicality. Only when confronted with real-world choices do an individual's true values emerge.

Such is the reasonable, if somewhat familiar, message in Lanford Wilson's latest play Angels Fall, a drama that attempts to show that moral choices aren't always clear cut. And while Wilson effectively leads his audience into the thickets of moral ambiguity, he is less successful at leading it out again; In attempting to make too many statements, Wilson winds up clubbing his audience over the head with what soon becomes unwelcome wisdom.

Wilson's "message" is made all the more heavy handed by the absence of a plausible plot, or truly three-dimensional characters. The characters are all assembled in a mission in rural New Mexico and are held together by an even flimsier pretext--an explosion in a nearby uranium mine. The quarantine provides the characters with just enough time--24 hours--to sort out their problems and to remind us in no uncertain terms of the health hazards the indian population faces daily.

Each of the central characters in the play is the product of a blighted past. Take, for example, Niles Harris (Guy Strauss), the renouned art history professor who ends his heralded teaching career by announcing to his class that he knows nothing about art. Or Father William Doherty (Leonard Corman), the kind, elderly parishoner who is torn between molding his foster son (Mark Rogers) into a badly-needed Indian physician and allowing him to pursue a lucrative and prestigious position in cancer research. Or Marion Clay (Maryann Bergonzi), the widow of a wealthy artist who divides her time between lamenting a bygone past and "managing" an adolescent tennis star.

By themselves, each of these tales of sorrow might make an interesting topic for a play. Yet the unlikely combination of the three--clumsily intertwined with a less than subtle statement decrying industrial exploitation of the defenseless Indians--causes Angels Fall to lose the impact of its message. By the second act, these self-professed disinterested individuals have become interested enough in one another to begin lecturing them. When Father Dougherty tells the cast, "I think I will preach a sermon tonight," the audiences' worst fears are confirmed.

Moreover, Wilson's condemnations of academia are often overly-harsh, often to the point of sounding adolescent. Though Wilson stops short of raging an outright attack on authority and its preceptors, his picture of religion and scholasticism is notably unsympathetic. Potential "heroes" are either washed up and disillusioned by their own insight, or undercut their own good intentions with overbearing concern.

The performance itself is equally lukewarm. Rogers' portrait of the foster son Don is convincing, and Bob Knapp gives a highly amusing, if at times overdone, performance of Marion's boyfriend, Zappy. On the whole, however, most of the actors lack the energy the play calls for and resort to maudlin, melodramatic performances.

Angels Fall offers up some provocative moral questions and even takes steps toward answering them. Yet because the playwright bites off more than he can chew, the play is little more than a series of hackneyed lectures strung together by an essentially uninspired cast. Wilson and company might have done better to spend less time looking for answers, and devoted more time to hunting down a good editor instead.