New Mexico Mercury

New Mexico Mercury

Following dreams - to the end of the road

December 09, 2013

By Wally Gordon

How far should you follow your dreams? When do dreams become obsessions? Obsessions become delusions? Delusions become tragedy?

These are the questions I pondered as I left a Saturday evening performance of a new play, Up (The Man in the Flying Chair) at the Mother Road Theater in Albuquerque.

The story took me by surprise. I had read a prewrite published Dec. 1 in the Albuquerque Journal (which has not reviewed the actual performance) that declared, “The real message is to follow your dreams, to be passionate and to be true to who you are,” accompanied by a happy illustration of a man joyfully flying in a chair.

I don’t want to give away the surprising twists in the second act, but I could find no such “message” in the evolution of this drama. Although accompanied by happy music and light-hearted stage business, the play struck me as a tragedy, and one that made me think rather somberly about how a person should live his life, about the two-facedness of dreams, how they can both invigorate and enervate, create and destroy.

Such, to my mind, is the ultimate purpose of all artistic endeavor, rather written, performed or visual: to force us to confront ourselves and our own lives, to tell us something about the human condition and to offer us a narrative that explains the ultimately inexplicable dilemma of being thinking beings living amid the unavoidable consciousness of our own inevitable death.

Up is about an average American family, struggling, surviving and failing. The father is an unemployed inventor of a flying chair; the mother delivers mail; the son finds his vocation as a phone salesman; his girlfriend is a single teen impregnated by another man. They all have dreams. And their dreams penetrate profoundly to the core of their existence. But at the end, which comes rather suddenly, unexpectedly, the audience is left hanging, suspended between events and consequences, not sure what the resolution is of the drama we have been witnessing for the past two hours.

Up reminded me of the tragic lead in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, another man with a failed dream, and of Langston Hughes’s famous line that a dream deferred is like a raisin in the sun.

Mother Road, which has a reputation of doing edgier, more adventurous plays than many local companies, took a chance in scheduling such a drama amid the traditional holiday tales and happy musicals that fill Albuquerque stages at this time of year. For taking such chances, director Vic Browder and his cast, led by fine performances by Shangreaux Lagrave and Amy Suman, are to be commended.

Up continues Thursdays-Sundays until Dec. 22 at 6320 Domingo NE, in Albuquerque. For tickets and information call 243-0596 or go to motherroad.org.

This piece was written by:

Wally Gordon

Wally Gordon, who was for 12 years owner and editor of The Independent in Edgewood, began his career with three summer jobs at The New York Times while he was a student at Brown University. He spent a decade with the Baltimore Sun, including stints as national investigative reporter and Washington Bureau manager. He has freelanced or been a staff writer and editor for dozens of newspapers and magazines all over the United States.

Extensive travels have taken him to all 50 states and more than 60 foreign countries. He wrote a novel in Spain, edited a newspaper in American Samoa, served in the U.S. Army in Iran and taught for two years at a university in West Africa.

He is the author of A Reporter's World: Passions, Places and People. The new nonfiction book is a collection of essays, columns, and magazine and newspaper stories published during his journalistic career spanning more than half a century. Many of the pieces were first published in The Independent or in other New Mexico newspapers and magazines. The book includes profiles of the famous, the infamous and the anonymous, travel and adventure yarns, and essays on the major issues and emotions of our times.

A native of Atlanta, he has lived in New Mexico since 1978 and in the East Mountains since 1990. He has been married for 28 years to Thelma Bowles, a native New Mexican who is a photographer and French teacher. They have one son, Sergei.