I just saw the play Angels Fall by Lanford Wilson and I feel bad because the play was for the most part really boring. I don't know if it was the acting or just the play itself, or maybe it's me, because I'm so used to watching TV and movies, but plays are just boring.

First of all, the characters never talk like real people. Dialogue must always be snappy and sparkling and I don't know about you, but I've never been in a conversation where the dialogue is snappy and sparkling like it is on stage, or if they have spoken that way, they could sustain it for more than a few minutes. In a play, the sparkling dialogue has to go for over an hour, maybe even 3 hours.

Then there are those long monologues and speeches. God, nobody ever talks for more than a minute in real life. And usually if someone does like that, they're like some stuffy professor type or something.

I feel bad because I go to plays now and I sit there thinking, this is the reason why the theatre in America is dying. It's boring, stuffy and unrealistic and the stories and ideas being put forth seem irrelevant somehow.

And this play, Angels Fall, should be relevant because it's about people stuck in a church after some disaster. It's so 9/11. But, I don't know. Watching it felt so artificial. Has 9/11 made me think that theatre is so irrelevant now? Granted Angels Falls did premier on Broadway in 1982 and 1983 and was even nominated for a Tony award for Best Play that year, so it it a little dated, but it was more than that.

I think I finally got tonight that the difference between plays and movies, is a play is about ideas and doesn't necessarily have to tell a story. A movie is storytelling in visual form and can be about ideas, but the movie's job is to tell a story. A play doesn't have to tell a story. And this play did not really have a plot.

Two couples along with a priest and a young boy are stuck in a church in some remote part of New Mexico after a mining accident at a uranium mine closes all the roads. Thatt's the whole plot. The rest of the play shows them interacting, having conversations and telling each other and the audience the story of their wretched lives. There's hardly any action, just people walking off and on stage. The only action is in the dialogue, that sparkly dialogue, that artificial way people talk only in plays.

One could even say the title of the play, Angels Fall, refer to the three male characters in the play, who have all been put up on pedestals by their groups and by each other. In the play, we see that they're just human, not divine, that they have free will and choice and they sometimes don't make very good decisions. And in a secondary theme, the play was also about doing what you love doing and not letting anyone tell you to do otherwise no matter how well intentioned.

I'm going to have to think about this play some more. I can't tell whether I liked it or not. The author is no slouch. He won a pulitzer pruze for a play called Talley's Folly". So he has to be a good writer. But I didn't like the other play of his I saw, Redwood Curtain either. It's definitely just me and not him. I think I expected more storytelling and instead I got exposition and ideas, And it's the lack of storytelling that makes for a me, a very boring play.