SLU Theater kicked off its season Friday night with the play “Language of Angels,” by Naomi Iizuka.
The theatre department took on a big challenge with this play. The characters lacked depth and personality, without any interaction between one another until the last half of the play. In addition, the plotline is patchy at best. The season’s opener is as tedious as it is incoherent.
Set in a rural town in North Carolina, the actors tell their versions of what happened the night they set out to party in a local cave.
A young girl, Celie (Junior Lindsey Trout), vanished that night, and her spirit haunts the friends. Throughout the play, the circle of friends looks back in time at the events of that evening and how those events affected each of them.
The production does excel with its effects. The visual and sound effects convey the eeriness the play intends to construct. The lighting and camera effects used on the stage set the tone of the play.
In act one, Seth (Billy Kelly), Kendra (Alex Woodruff) and J.B. (Cale Haupert) each tell their version of the story in a way that makes them unearthly. Each stands alone on a dark stage with a single light shining on them, giving an ethereal feel. The video effects used on Trout as she chillingly paces in the depths of the stage are simply haunting.
The entire first act of the play depends on the ability of these characters to intrigue the audience and draw them into the story.
However, even if the audience can get past the shoddy and inconsistent southern accents that are tried out, they are left with uninteresting and boring characters. Iizuka paints uninteresting, stereotypical characters that do not leave any sort of impression on the audience.
The actors, disregarding the accents, do a good job of developing their characters, though there is still an inability for the audience to connect to them because of flat characterization. Because Iizuka has no empathy for her characters, neither does the audience, making this already confusing plot even more difficult to follow.
In act two, the audience is introduced to four more characters that are related to the storyline, but have virtually no bearing on the plot itself. It focuses a completely different set of events and just adds to the confusion.
At least in act two the audience gets to see the characters interact with each other. Billy (Jegar Fickel) stands out as the wildly uncontrollable loose cannon of the group, and Lauren Hoeing is a natural playing his simple-minded girlfriend Allison. The interaction between Danielle (Healy Rodman) and mysterious stranger, Michael (Chris Lyons), however, is unconvincing and monotonous.
The finale, a would-be moving ending, has J.B. visiting Danielle near the end of their lives to discuss the negative effects of their troubled teenage years.
The scene sends messages of how lies will always find a way of coming back and how one cannot avoid the consequences of their misdoings; however, all is lost in the rather flat and unmoving acting. It seems that what little steam these actors had in the first act of the play vanishes much like Celie did. It is obvious that, like their audience, they have also become bored and tired of this play. The stage is emotionless and uncomfortable, and it renders the message meaningless.
SLU Theatre is off to a rocky start. However, much is to blame on the material and not on the actors. “Angels” proves to be a hard work to make interesting and enjoyable. Long after the curtain closes, the audience is left pondering why all of it happened. The plot is difficult to follow and the scenes jump around, detached from one another and disorganized.
The slow-paced flow, uninteresting characters and dull emotions will have you edging for the door.
