‘Angels’ provokes questioning, conclusions

A bottle of alcohol laid on the ground a few feet from where a group of drunken teenagers danced provocatively to the harsh sounds of dubstep.

There was a sudden flash of light, and in slow motion, the exaggerated characters moved so that every detail of their emotion was conveyed to the audience.

It was the opening scene of “Language of Angels” opening night and it set the ambience for realistic suspense of an unrealistic story.  

“It was in those first small moments where we could see the characters move toward one another in a way that would eventually help to tell the story,” sophomore audience member Taylor Crousore said.

The opening scene was not in the original script, but was added instead by first-time director Adam Noble.

“He asked us to think of our favorite high school party memory, one we would never forget, and that’s what we went off of,” said freshman Colin Van Wye, who played the role of JB. “It was the right way to make it feel natural and with the right music, I think the rave scene gave the audience that modern emotional understanding.”

Van Wye said Noble never had an exact way of depicting the characters for the actors. Instead, Noble encouraged the actors to explore the characters for themselves.

Junior actress Stephanie Cohen, who played Celie, said Noble’s suggested journal keeping let her grow as an actress and feel her character.

“I was allowed to be onstage and be dead and alive at the same time,” Cohen said. “To explore that was really neat.”

In the play, Cohen’s character Celie goes missing after a group of teenagers party in the deep caves of North Carolina. Though what happened to Celie is never made clear to the audience, her spirit lives on to haunt the friends who never looked for her that night.

“Originally I didn’t know anything about the play except for the fact that it was a ghost story and later that it was a Japanese noh (a form of classical Japanese music drama),” Cohen said. “But now I see it describing what it means to be young and free and feel like you can do anything to having one night’s events determining the rest of your life.”

To understand the setting of the story and how things were for the characters in those crucial moments, the cast took a trip to Indiana’s Marengo Cave.

“It let us feel what complete darkness really was,” Van Wye said. “Our eyes couldn’t read any light, and it was just so dark, we couldn’t even see the outline of our hand inches in front of our face.”

The experience helped the cast understand the lost feeling of the characters as well as convey the haunting dark feeling to the audience.

“When you think of angels, most think of a protector,” Crousore said. “But the play didn’t portray Celie that way at all but instead in a more demonic way that was really interesting.”

Crousore said that when the audience was blindingly flashed by stage lights to signify a change of time or place, the visual adjustment in those few seconds really shared that lost, dark feeling of the characters. Cohen said it was one effect the cast used to help the audience reflect on the message of the play.

“‘Language of Angels’ has a definite spirituality about it,” Cohen said. “One of my lines in the play is ‘remember me forever,’ and I think it says so much about how the people in our lives and in our past affect our present and will reflect in our future.”

Cohen said the level of ambiguity in the story really allows the audience to take the play in several meaningful ways and she said that was exactly what the cast wanted.

“I hope the audience left the theater questioning their interpretation,” Van Wye said. “We didn’t want people to see the play and be able to say this is exactly what happened, but we wanted them to continue to think about it and show interest even afterwards in the meaning of it all.”

Crousore said for him, the play was indeed a process of trying to figure things out and come to conclusions.

“Sometimes you want justice in an ending,” Crousore said. “But with this ending, you have to create your own, and I think that’s what’s most enticing.”