About the Play:

Angels Fall has long been a favourite of acting teachers for Female Monologues and Male Monologues.

Angels Fall is a brilliant full-length drama by Lanford Wilson. Two pairs of motorists – forced to seek refuge from the heat with the possibility of nuclear disaster looming outside the doors – come to a New Mexico mission to seek spiritual counselling from a priest and his Native American protégé. They wrestle with questions of faith and enduring legacy. Angels Fall is a beautiful play that engages audiences with its humour, poignancy and its fierce debate about the importance of doing what you were put on this earth to do.

Angels Fall presents six diverse individuals who are brought together by chance in a humble adobe mission church on a remote Navajo reservation. A middle-aged college professor and his lovely young wife detour unexpectedly after the government closes the highway in rural New Mexico because of a possible "accident" at a nearby nuclear facility. Also trapped at the church are a wise and sophisticated artist's widow and her neurotic tennis player boy toy, en route to one of his important matches in California. Welcoming these stranded four is a hyperactive priest, filled with goodness but with a view of the truth that may not be fair. He's using every trick in his repertoire to make a gifted young Native American doctor stay on the reservation and care for his people instead of taking a highly sought-after research position at a prestigious research facility. Confined within the church as they await the hoped for "all clear" signal the six, after an initial reserve, begin to reveal their stories to each other – their problems and possibilities, their hopes and fears, the personal crises which have brought them not only to this place but to turning points in their lives. Through his witty and probing dialogue, playwright Lanford Wilson examines meaty questions that resonate on a personal as well as philosophical level. At its core, the play is about truth vs. fiction. What are the fabrications we tell ourselves or accept from others? And where exactly does the truth lie?

Angels Fall premiered at Miami's New World Festival, then opened Off-Broadway by the Circle Repertory Company, transferred to Broadway at the Longacre Theatre in 1982 and was nominated for the 1983 Tony Award for Best Play. While this often-studied American theatre classic is rarely performed professionally, it is produced frequently in regional, college, and community theatre productions.

Cast: 2 female, 4 male

What people say:

"…the best American play on Broadway this season …a tender and moving experience…." — New York Magazine

"It is realistic, yet it sings with a sweet unaffected poetry." — New York Post

"Angels Fall is a warm, funny touching, highly satisfying theatrical evening." — Village Voice

About the Playwright:

Lanford Wilson (1937-2011) was one of the most distinguished American playwrights of the late 20th century. He was instrumental in drawing attention to off-off Broadway, where his first works were staged in the mid-1960s. He was also among the first playwrights to move from that milieu to renown on wider stages, ascending to Off Broadway, and then to Broadway, within a decade of his arrival in New York. His work has also long been a staple of regional theaters throughout the United States. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1980, was elected in 2001 to the Theater Hall of Fame, and in 2004 was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.