ooFALL FROM GRACE

FALL FROM GRACE is a powerful symbolic statement of protest. It represents a sort of blank verse, poetic/ prophetic indictment of the shallow, rootless banality of current culture. The form chosen happens to be architectural, but the scope is far wider. Minimalism infected a multitude of fields, including literary criticism, where it was seriously argued that one could fully understand Shakespeare with no knowledge of Elizabethan England! “Connectedness is dead!” It was Santayana who observed that those who are ignorant of history are doomed to repeat it, and the failure to understand and appreciate our past is everywhere appallingly evident. The malady is widespread but all too rarely recognized, let alone seriously addressed therapeutically. It is the virtue of this play that it does spotlight the bacillus and display it in all its ugliness, through no remedial prescription is offered, except by implication.

The protagonist here, through symbolic of Prometheus at one level, discovers that his “gift” to man is of dubious value, which only adds to his pain. He finds solace in a wry humor and a return to basics: he will take his grandson to the zoo. But his hubris endures in his last words. He lives in hope that he still may bring light into a darkling world. And the play’s viewers shares that hope.

William Graham Cole, Ph.D

author of The Restless Quest of Modern Man