Windbags Inc.

By T.E.K

ANGELS FALL by Lanford Wilson

Sequestering incompatible people on islands, in hotels or at roadside hash houses under duress is one of the hoariest devices known to drama. Vide, The Admirable Crichton, Grand Hotel and The Petrified Forest. The notion is that some transcendent revelation will descend on these characters as they sit and stew. The only revelation to be gleaned from the bulk of Lanford Wilson's plays, starting with The Hot I Baltimore, is that his characters are circusy clones of people originally conceived by William Saroyan, Tennessee Williams and William Inge. Their common plaint is that life has failed them, whereas it seems pellucidly clear that they have copped out on life.

The whiny oddball crew assembled in Angels Fall is not without its vagrant appeal, though the play's title is pretentious. As ill chance has it, the characters are immured in a New Mexico mission house on a false atomic-emergency alert. There is a rich widow (Tanya Berezin) who has purchased a potential Wimbledon champ (Brian Tarantina) for off-court recreation. There is an Ivy League professor (Fritz Weaver), broken in mind, health and will, who has reached the conclusion that teaching is a fraud. His much younger wife (Nancy Snyder) is as smarmily supportive as she is unbearably actressy. And then there is Barnard Hughes, a man who enhances the scope and embellishes the vocabulary of acting every time he steps on a stage. He plays a tart priest whose vocation has gone AWOL.

These are not piddling concerns, but they are put to the footling purpose of endless windbaggery. As one perplexed playgoer put it at the opening-night intermission, "Why are these people talking to each other?" --T.E.K.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.