Introduction & Overview of Angels Fall by Lanford Wilson

Angels Fall Introduction

More than twenty years after its debut, Lanford Wilson's Angels Fall continues to be a little-known and rarely produced play. Commissioned by the New World Festival of Miami, Florida, in 1982, it moved to the Circle Repertory Theater in New York later that year. In 1983, despite a brief run on Broadway, New York drama critic John Simon judged it as the best American play that season. Unlike the familiar urban and Midwestern settings of Wilson's previous plays, Angels Fall is set in a church in the desert of the American Southwest. The catalyst for the play's action—a nuclear accident at a uranium mine that forces a group of people to take refuge at a Catholic mission—is more overtly political than many of his other plays and can even be seen, particularly through the figure of Father Doherty, as a morality tale about the nuclear age.

Although the...
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