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Synchronicity’s ‘Language of Angels’
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
THEATER REVIEW: “Language of Angels.� Through Nov. 21.
I have known places so still that time seems to have stopped, rooms so thick with the past that you can feel the lingering presence of others. My grandmother's house was like that. Not haunted, but alive with memories.
Yet when I returned recently for my first visit in nearly 20 years, it felt entirely different. The owners had remodeled the place, flooded it with light and comfort, but oddly, what once seemed a rambling maze of dark nooks and crannies appeared smaller, as if all that pent-up time had disappeared, shrinking the house.
Had the voices I once knew been erased — or summoned forth?
In her murky ghost story “The Language of Angels,� Naomi Iizuka attempts to describe a similarly odd experience, or what she calls a “collapsing of time,� by introducing elements of Noh theater into the story of a group of working-class North Carolina youths. (Noh Carolina?) In this contemporary tale of a young woman who disappears in a cave, her friends come forward to tell their side of events, yet the pieces never add up.
What’s really happening here? Why do these people behave so strangely? Who’s alive, and who’s dead? Rachel May’s Synchronicity Performance Group staging has an intentional ambiguity of tone, a beveled edge that’s at once seductive and unsettling. What makes the play so alluring is that we never really know the facts.
In one scene, characters refer to a rapping on the door as rain. It's a discombobulating, comic moment that suggests mysterious phenomena don't just frequent haunted houses or abandoned cemeteries. Iizuka knows that a hint, a suggestion, of the supernatural is infinitely more upsetting than a scream.
As we wade through the characters’ recollections, we learn that the disappeared woman, Celie (Rachel Mewbron), was obsessed with angels, that her father spoke in tongues, that her mother later became a palm reader.
As her ex-boyfriend Seth (Joe Sykes) explains why people are drawn to explore the cave, his face widens with innocence and awe. Grinning like a mule eating briars, he explains the fun of getting high — and the torture of getting lost.
While Celie flits in and out, we meet the angry Billy (JC Long), his girlfriend Allison (Kate Donadio), the randy and reflective sheriff JB (Jeff Feldman), the quirky Kendra (Kristi Casey), the troubled Danielle (Rachel Roberts) and her newfound beau, Michael (Theroun Patterson), who looks a lot like her dead boyfriend, Tommy.
These interconnected relationships are fragmented and fraught.
Most of the characters aren't fully fleshed out, but the most intriguing ones are perhaps Billy (played with an incendiary quality by Long) and Danielle (whom Roberts depicts with a time-worn knowingness). One quibble: Patterson does nothing that he hasn't done elsewhere, and there's a vaguely befuddled quality to his style that makes you think he sometimes doesn't know where the story’s taking him.
Rochelle Barker has created an appropriately dark and portentous cave (complete with three enormous stalagmites), and Sabina Maja Angel’s blurry videos add to the story’s palimpsest-like quality.
Though Iizuka explores Noh, the Japanese influences are wisely subtle. May has a gut instinct that’s more effective than arcane references or overintellectualization.
Still, if you don’t quite grasp the language of “Language,â€? that’s not just OK — it’s completely natural. Iizuka’s play will grow on you. And it may conjure up floating remnants of your own past, places you’ve known, faces that are gone but … not … quite … forgotten.
THE VERDICT: Will you live to tell what happened?
8 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays; 7 p.m. Sundays. Oct. 22- Through Nov. 21. $15-$20; discounts for groups, students and senior citizens. Synchronicity Performance Group, 7 Stages Back Stage, 1105 Euclid Ave. N.E., Atlanta. 404-325-5168, www.synchrotheatre.com.
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