Reginald Metcalf and Ames Adamson

At the beginning of Dan Dietz’s play Tilt Angel, now receiving its professional premiere, Lois (Andrea Gallo), a middle aged woman, falls gracefully though a blue sky toward earth. She is the victim of a mid-air plane crash. Later in the play, she will quite literally transubstantiate herself as a vegetable garden for Ollie (Ian August), her hungry mentally impaired 21 year-old agoraphobic son, who is helping her to go peacefully into the afterlife. This is done with the help of a blues-singing Angel Bones (Reginald Metcalf), apparently a winged half angel/airlines pilot with goggles. There is no help forthcoming from Red (Ames Adamson), Ollie’ s resentful, indifferent father who refuses to claim the ashes.

In Cailin Heffernan’s cleverly surreal staging of this play, described by the author as “a deadpan Tennessee Fairy Tale,” worlds as well as the members of a working class family collide. In actuality, Tilt Angel appears to be an impressionistic dark comedy in which the skewed perceptions of a socially disenfranchised young man are given a vivid reality. In this very imaginatively conceived yet unsettling play, we are privy to Ollie’s skewed world, notably his home comprised of disquieting distortions and expectations.

Lois had taken about all she could from Red, a callous, crude 3^rd generation owner of an auto body repair shop in East Tennessee. She had also done as much as she could for the pathetically limited Ollie, who hasn’t left the house in 9 years. Lois, who finally made up her mind to leave them both and begin a new life that includes getting a college education, took the fateful airplane ride and died.

At home, the simple-minded Ollie, who likes to dance while doing the housework and laundry, keeps getting calls from “an airlines guy” for someone to claim Lois’s remains. Ollie’s pleas to the insensitive Red, who barely acknowledges Ollie’s existence, only spark Red’s fury which he takes out mostly on the metal parts of cars. Red has been estranged from his son ever since an accident occurred years ago in the body shop causing the loss of his arm, but continues to do his repairs with the help of a prosthetic pincer-type apparatus controlled by a harness he wears over his shoulders. Blaming Ollie for the accident, Red has left Ollie to fend for himself.

Without Red’s help to retrieve Lois’ remains, Ollie deals with the problem in the only way he knows: by seeking help from the angel pilot. As both Ollie and Red wrestle with their grief through flashbacks and metaphysical communication, Lois’s presence asserts itself as a soul needing closure. Ollie’s anxieties about his mother’s burial takes him to such abstracted places as inside the telephone lines, the ethereal world and eventually into the fearsome underworld, while Red’s unwillingness to claim the body or deal with his son’s presence provokes a rather unexpected resolve.

Trying to analyze this play may not prove as fruitful as the experiencing of it. Heffernan’s direction appears to be in complete accord with the playwright’s eerily dramatic contours. And the performances are effective in their eccentricity without being cartoons. August creates a rather poignant portrait of Ollie, who, despite being a social outcast and a failure in his father’s eyes, is determined to find a way to help his mother go peacefully into the after-life.

Adamson is terrific as the rage and resentment-propelled Red whose life is shattered by the accident and a disintegrating marriage. There is a disarming charm to Gallo’s performance as Lois, a woman who, soon after she is married and has done all she can to nurture and protect Ollie, discovers her own potential and seeks out a new life. And perhaps capturing the essence of the ethereal most wittily is Reginald Metcalf, as the lyrical Angel Bones. Praise to the wittily integrated songs and lyrics, assumedly the creation of award-winning Texas-based playwright Dietz, who may have mixed more grit (or is its grits?) into his Southern Gothic comical-tragedy than some people will cotton to. But the experience was refreshingly haunting (seems just right for Halloween).

Production values are imaginative. Randy Lee Hartwig and Matthew R. Campbell are both credited with the expressionistic set (impressively lighted by designer Jill Nagle) that provides a virtual collage of various places in and out of this world. Costumer Patricia E. Doherty has to be praised for creating Lois’ vegetable garden costume that proves to be as incredible as it is edible.

Tilt Angel (October 15 – November 20, 2005)

New Jersey Repertory Company, 179 Broadway, Long Branch, New Jersey 07740