It may seem paradoxical but it often happens that traveling to distant places gives you a clearer understanding of home. Having just returned to New Mexico after three months in northern California, I have acquired a new and broader perspective on some aspects of New Mexico. One of them is the unusual theater scene in the Albuquerque area.
All this is by way of commenting on two Albuquerque plays I saw last weekend. One of them, Good People, at the Vortex, a drama about a working class woman trapped in her life by events beyond her control, left me on the verge of tears. The other, Boeing Boeing at the Aux Dog Theater, a French farce about two bachelors and three airline stewardesses, drew a full house and nearly everybody left the theater with a smile on their face.
But before I get to these plays, I want to detour to compare my perspectives of San Francisco and Albuquerque.
The San Francisco metro area has about 2 million people and some 36 theater companies. The Albuquerque metro area of about 900,000 residents has some 50 theater companies. But the differences extend beyond numbers.
By and large, California productions are expensive and the venues large. Most of the companies pay their actors and directors and some pay their production and stage crews.
With the area’s struggling newspapers and magazines shrinking their arts coverage to the vanishing point (as is also happening in New Mexico), it is difficult for theaters to reach the large and diverse region. Many, therefore, have hired professional public relations companies to get the word out. Even events as small as readings in bookstores or performances in a suburban college amphitheater are turned over to the pros to publicize.
All of this means that putting on a play or even a reading in the Bay Area is a daunting task that involves a substantial amount of money and organization. Tickets are expensive, and a lot of them have to be sold to make ends meet. Thus producers and theatrical companies are cautious about their choice of what to put on.
Despite San Francisco’s often justified reputation as the Wild West of the imagination, most of what is performed in the theaters is highly conventional. The tried and true—musical comedies, revivals and classics—dominate the scene. There are exceptions, and I was lucky enough to have attended one of them, Grounded, an extraordinary one character tour de force in which actress Laura English standing on a bare stage entranced an audience for more than two hours. As the minutes passed, you could see her change from an adventurous fighter pilot to a desk-bound drone pilot, step by step her personality coming apart, her emotional balance slipping, her life moving from joy to tragedy in a way that to this day continues to haunt me. But this was a work in progress performed without sets in a tiny theater in the Tenderloin, a rundown and dangerous part of the city.
In Albuquerque, on the other hand, while leading actors and directors are sometimes paid, supporting actors, backstage crews and front office helpers almost never are. Most of the venues are very small, inexpensive and with only basic theatrical facilities. The supporting equipment, such as lights and costumes and sets, are minimal. Producers do their own promotions. I have never heard of a local theater relying on professional public relations experts.
Thus tickets are inexpensive and a show can break even with modest-sized audiences.
All this may explain why we have more shows, and even more adventurous productions, in our small provincial city than does the vast metropolis in the Bay Area.
It also helps to explain the unusual diversity of our productions. The two shows I saw last weekend are a case in point.
Good People, which premiered in New York in 2011 and recently had a run at the Santa Fe Playhouse, is something extraordinary. It breaks the mold of serious contemporary dramas, which are almost invariably about dysfunctional families. It also breaks the mold in another way: It is not afraid to confront the bitterest and most divisive issues of class, race and gender.
The most powerful moment in the play occurs midway through the last act when Margaret, a single mother in her late 40s, explodes to a man who had been her lover 30 years earlier. She tells him that he had achieved success because he had been lucky while she had never had real choices, dealing with the impossible circumstances of her life the best she could. He thought of himself as one of the “good people” who succeeded on merit. But Margaret, with all her foibles and failures, is the true heroine.
Director Janet Davidson, who says her own life has been haunted by a secret akin to the one exposed in the play, has done a superb job as has all the cast, most notably Debrianna Mansini as Margaret.
An unusual aspect of the play is that the numerous set changes are handled in front of the audience by a trio of bickering sanitation workers—a female supervisor and two carping male underlings.
This play deserves to be sold out every night—forever. Instead, when I was there during a Sunday matinee, the audience was sparse. The show closes Nov. 24. Call 247-8600 or go to vortexabq.org
The other play I saw last weekend was sold out on a Saturday night. Boeing Boeing at the Aux Dog Theater (3011 Monte Vista, 254-7716), continues until Dec. 1. It had a seven-year run in London, setting the record for the longest-running international production of a French play. In 2008 it won a Tony award In New York.
Like most farces, the humor depends on split-second timing, a difficult feat that Victoria J. Liberatori, the company’s producing artistic director, and the six-person cast have ably managed. For me, the surprising standout in the cast was young Matthew Puett, making his Albuquerque stage debut. The character grows on stage from a floundering naif to a tough and resilient young man making independent moral choices for himself.
Also a standout was Angela Littleton as the witty and acerbic maid.
The plot revolves around an American bachelor in Paris who simultaneously conducts affairs with three airline stewardesses by maintaining precise arrival and departure schedules. When an old college buddy arrives and the three women don’t stick to schedule, all kinds of ridiculous but comic hijinks transpire on stage.
Seeing these two plays in a single weekend reminded me how fortunate we are to live in an area that, despite all its hard times, sustains such cultural diversity and vibrancy.
Responses to “Tragedy and comedy on the Albuquerque stage”