Language of Angels by Naomi Iizuka

"[Iizuka] has taken some of the ghostly structure of the classical Japanese Noh play, recast it in a rural idiom and infused it with a humming, explosive energy -- language used like a loaded weapon."

"What gives Language of Angels its strangeness, and a certain eerie magnetism, is that all these questions, pastpresentfuture, float around the stage simultaneously, unstuck from characters and chronology. Additionally, the play gives its most lyrical speeches to people who are insistently inarticulate. The angels are tarnished, earthbound, and their language has a kind of brute poetry."

"Great theater creates a trance and weaves the audience into a world with its own irrefutable logic and connections. That's what happens in Language of Angels, Naomi Iizuka's splendidly realized drama about small-town tragedies. Language is about the sort of marginal, working-class lives short story writer Raymond Carver chronicled. Like Carver, Iizuka celebrates the struggle and humanity and imploded despair of her characters without sentimentalizing it or condescending."

"The only setting better than Appalachia for drama would be a cave in Appalachia, which happens to be where Naomi Iizuka's heavy-hitting play Language of Angels mostly takes place... The set's minimalism provides the perfect counterpoint to Iizuka's lush, evocative narrative style, and the opening monologue by Seth hooks the audience instantly."

"With Language of Angels, Iizuka has created a Rashomonlike meditation on the nature of memory, grief and passing time. To do this, she has taken some of the ghostly structure of the classical Japanese Noh play, recast it in a rural idiom and infused it with a humming, explosive energy -- language used like a loaded weapon. She is an important and arresting talent."