Review: “The Fall of Heaven”

From time to time, any enterprise will encounter an opportunity to demonstrate irrefutably its own singular character—to lay out what it’s good at that belongs to it alone. Such is the Repertory Theatre of St. Louis’s current production of novelist Walter Mosely’s first play, The Fall of Heaven, directed by Seth Gordon. This offering serves as a billboard for what a well-funded, well-curated professional theater can afford the St. Louis show-goer: top-notch professional on-stage talent and an expensive caliber of technical slickery applied to a thoroughly entertaining piece of writing by a literary heavy-hitter. While I’ve oft professed a tendency toward the smaller and comparatively more punk-rock echelon of local theater purveyors, no degree of jaded hipsterdom could coax a derisive penstroke from me regarding this engaging, fantastical morality play.

Walter Mosely based The Fall of Heaven upon his novel The Tempest Tales. The play introduces us to Tempest Landry (Bryan Terrell Clark) in a cellphone face-off with his lady and his girl, moments before he is gunned down by 17 shots from police service revolvers—the wrong man. In a heartbeat we rejoin Tempest queueing up for St. Peter’s judgment, knowing from our brief interaction with him that this cat is morally ambiguous at least. Condemned to the Pit for all eternity, Tempest up and says “no” and quick-as-a-bunny he’s back in Harlem a few years down the road with a new face and a new acquaintance, Joshua Angel (Corey Allen), the angel Peter assigns to make Tempest take his medicine and embrace his fate. Okay, let’s stop here to acknowledge the elephant in the room: yup, you’ve seen this. Or, at least some approximation. This is where an excellent writer comes in. Take a well-worn theme–deceased returns to Earth with angelic guidance–and add the inimitable voice of Walter Mosley, best known for his series of Easy Rawlins suspense novels, and a nearly cliché mise-en-scène becomes a rich playground for examination of moral greys, along with a healthy dose of American racial politics.

Tempest’s refusal to accept his judgment knits him to his angel Joshua, as Tempest tries to equivocate his many moral shortcomings as revealing greater nuance than Joshua (or his boss Peter) wish to recognize. Along the way, Joshua falls into an emotional, corporeal  involvement which waylays his drive to exact satisfaction of Peter’s sentence. While Tempest argues for examination of the moral black-and-white of his judgment, angel Joshua forestalls his own duty lest he suffer personal loss. Along the way, while trying to literally outrun Heaven’s sentence, Tempest makes the acquaintance of one Basil Bob (Jeffrey C. Hawkins), well-known pit-boss of the territory of the damned, hoping to leverage the gate-keeper of Hell against Heaven’s representative in his relentless pursuit of, if not salvation, at least a loophole.

Back to what I said at the top, the Repertory is almost where this show had to happen. A writer of Mosley’s stature wants to work with a company that gets butts in seats and art in front of eyeballs. Mosley’s play, while not the literary masterwork of a generation, is a sharply written evening of theater, posing necessary moral questions against a largely familiar narrative setting. The respective voices of street-wise “get-over guy” Tempest and proper, righteous, overwhelmed Joshua are written quite clearly and specifically. Where a pretty well-funded production company comes in is in putting those voices in the mouths of such top-tier talent as Allen and Clark. These two actors forge a real relationship with all the respect and resentment attendant thereto. The final arrow in the Rep’s quiver here is technical prowess. Against a common “Harlem” doorways-and-windows scrim, flyaways, drop-ins, trapdoors and rolling platforms allow the setting to change smoothly without undo interruption of theatrical ll flow. Throw in a crystalline audio environment and all kinds of John Coltrane and Roberta Flack, and you’ve got one of those nights at the theater you just hope is someone’s first live play, ’cause they’ll be fans for a lifetime.

If there are negatives, they are few. A thrust stage always threatens blocking problems, and the night I was in attendance, I completely lost a laugh-line delivered upstage by Rachel Leslie in one of her multiple roles, Darlene the secretary at Joshua’s Earth job—sounded like a doozy, too. While we’re on the subject of female characters, that’s also not Walter Mosley’s long suit. He’s said it himself that he sees his job to create fully realized Black male heroes, but along the way, women tend to be types, role-players. Joshua’s Earthly entanglement takes the form of Branwyn Weeks (Kenya Brome), a lover of Tempest’s whom the angel falls in love with and bears his human child. While the situation is rife with tension and moral ambiguity, all dramatic power and risk is borne by the men, and Brome isn’t given a whole lot of goodies to play with. Back on the men’s side, while Hawkins is an ideal Basil Bob (and performs a host of off-stage voices), he’s given the N-word to spew a couple of times, and while it squares with Tempest’s worldview as a Black American, the word doesn’t jibe with the worldly, hep, cool-dude Devil Hawkins gives us. It seems gratuitous.

Capital and clout can be (and often are) woefully misapplied in the arts, and you’ll never hear me advocate for throwing more money at a problem. However, when the resources are apportioned to talented folks committed to realizing the work of a distinctive voice such as Walter Mosley, something quite special can come about. The Fall of Heaven is the result of the best of effort, talent, skill and execution conspiring to create an evening of theater at once immediate and timeless, thoughtful and deceptively effortless. It feels like one of those that will be talked about for a while—take someone you know and see if they don’t come away asking when they can go see another show. It’s that kind of special.