Piano is a Marion Brittain Fellow in the School of Literature, Communication, and Culture at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. In this essay, Piano explores how strangers who inadvertently gather at a church during an environmental accident struggle to understand the importance of their lives in relation to their work.

Written in 1982 for the New World Festival of Miami, Florida, Angels Fall depicts a group of people, some of whom are strangers, who take refuge in a church during an accident at a nearby uranium mine. Set in New Mexico, the action takes place over the course of an afternoon and early evening. Both the desert setting and the use of a "sealed-room play"—a plot device that forces a group of people to interact with each other—increase their feeling of being isolated from the rest of the world. It is only through finding out...