Stage:

...In this case, an accident in a uranium mine in New Mexico closes the roads and forces a small group of people to take temporary shelter in Father Doherty's church...

...The doctor's choice of laboratory over reservation may violate the image Father Bill wants to force on him, but it emphasizes the play's assumption that the individual has to make his own decision...

...GERALD WEALES...

...Sometimes, as in A Tale Told, Wilson works in obvious stereotype...

...Angels Fall is another of those Wilson plays in which the dramatist brings together a disparate group of people, beset by anxiety, and allows them to talk-sometimes wittily, always articulately - while they try to cope with exterior pressures and interior doubts...

...The young man decides to take a lucrative (and perhaps socially useful) position in cancer research instead of staying, as Father Bill wants him to, to work on the medicine-poor reservation...

...And there is a central action of sorts...

...Yet, unless words have consequences, artistically speaking, why should we listen...

...Tennessee Williams once said, explaining his preference for the original ending to Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, that he did not believe that' 'a conversation, however revelatory," could bring an immediate change in a person...

...He is said to have been a very flamboyant classroom performer and presumably his mental and physical condition is heighten-ing his tendency toward high rhetoric, but the man's distress never becomes more than gesture...

...There is, as usual in Wilson, event to punctuate the talk...

...The professor's wife is a children's book author who dismisses her own work, but the tennis player's sweetie is the widow of a painter and the owner of a gallery who apparently sees herself as a Theo Van Gogh, a necessary connection between the artist and the world...

...The young and sullen Indian doctor saves the professor when he collapses...

...The two main characters of Angels Fall are essentially stereotypes-the crochety, fey priest and the histrionic are supposed to transcend mannerism and display the pain, need, uncertainty that give depth to the cliche...

...At his best, he does what realists have always done...

...Hughes is as outrageously actor-y as Weaver, but Niles Harris, unlike Father Doherty, never becomes more than a perform-ance...

...Fritz Weaver's Niles Harris has the opposite effect...

...Even more than usual, the gathering of Wilson characters is pushed before the examining eye of the playwright and the audience by an artificial device...

...That is, he decides at the end to do what he has already decided to do at the beginning, which means that Angels Fall lacks the kind of development that leads to the destruction of the archaeolog-ical research in The Mound Builders or even the decision not to sell the farm in The Fifth of July...

...Lanford Wilson needs a strong metaphorical or thematic structure to bring substance to the recognizable surface of his characters...

...Although Peter's question is an important one - perhaps, the important one - the answer here, even in the person of Father Doherty, smacks more of neatness than necessity...

...The two women characters fit oddly into this thematic scheme...

...According to the publicity release, Father Doherty was written for Bar-nard Hughes, and he plays it as though he had studied at the feet of Barry Fitzgerald and learned every comic tic of the lovable Irish priest...

...The most extended exposition of this point is given to the young tennis player, a comic figure of the athlete as hypochondriac, of the kept man as more child than stud...

...Peter seems to be concerned with how one prepares for eternal salvation, Wilson with how one lives best in a troubled world, but perhaps these are the same thing...

...What manner of conversation ought a play to be...

...Yet, Hughes manages to suggest that it is the character not the actor who learned from Fitzgerald, that his cute tricks are disguises, so that when the man's sense of loss, the priest's sense of dedication break through, Father Doherty has at least as much reality as Barnard Hughes...

...I never thought of Wilson as having such an old-fashioned view of female vocation, but now that it comes to mind I recall that Wilson women like the novelist in The Mound Builder and the heiress-cum-singer in The Fifth of July are much closer to despair than the wives, widows, mothers with whom they share stage space...

...I have admired Weaver since I saw him in The Chalk Garden in 1955, but he is at his strongest when he is under tight control (the television produc-tion of John Hawkes's The Question) or when his excesses serve the character (the villainous old man in A Tale Told...

...he uses the details of everyday life to provide a believa-ble surface for his people...

...The preacher and the teacher (the professor of art history who has disowned his past work in the classroom and in his books and is en route to a fashionable psychiatric clinic) will stick to their calling...

...The virtues and the dangers in the Wilson method can be seen in the performances of these two roles...

...What manner of persons ought we to be...

...Stage ANGELS FALL' EPISTLE OF PETER TO NEW MEXICO FATHER WILLIAM DOHERTY-Father Bill to his Indian parishioners-picks up his Bible midway through Lan-ford Wilson's Angels Fall and searches for a proper text for the situation, a proper epigraph for the play...

...GERALD WEALESy...

...Williams is probably correct, and Wilson, letting his people talk and then proceed to their original destinations, is closer to real life than Ugo Betti...

...Yet, within the play, she, like the professor's wife, functions as a lover-wife-mother, the traditional woman's role...

...The play's answer to Peter's question is that a person should follow his vocation...

...He seems a little too close to the center of the volume for Peter's second epistle, but there, in 3: 10-11, he finds what he needs, both a description of the end of the world which might have been written with nuclear destruction in mind and a posing of the play's central question...

...Although the talk contains a great deal of definition and self-definition, there is never a sense-as there is with Argia in The Queen and the Rebels-that the talk is the means to the realization of the necessary person...

...He uses all the obvious actor's bits dis-played in his recent television series...

...in fact, they preach and teach throughout the play...