Discover fine ABQ theaters

“Theater is always dying,” said Pulitzer prize winning playwright David Mamet.
In Albuquerque, this seems to exist as a perpetual freefall in orbit of the final death, which is, perhaps, why theater people find the whole thing so appealing.

Those of a UNM persuasion can possibly find such things immediately.  
The Auxiliary Dog Theater is near campus, a skip from the dorms, just east of Girard Boulevard at 3011 Monte Vista Drive next door to Artisan Art Supply and barely north of Buffalo Exchange.

Visitors are first greeted by a lobby functioning as an art galley with regularly rotating pieces organized by Beth Welt.
The staff, like the physical theater, is small and focused, aiming to draw the sort of creative vision that a place like Albuquerque needs.
“We’re doing theater for people who don’t like theater,” Executive Director Eli Browning said. “It’s risky because the traditional crowd doesn’t always like what we do, but we hope that we are reaching out to new audiences.”  

They are in the midst of production of “God” by Woody Allen, a batty and mind-bending play.
“It’s like I always say,” Browning said. “If you want to be an insufferable pretentious assh*** about theater, people will get sick of what you’re doing in a hurry.”

Theaters need that sort of flexibility and tenacity to exist in their perpetual death throws. And such is the ilk of Albuquerque’s theater scene.
A huge number of individual theater companies reside in Albuquerque: The Albuquerque Theatre Guild numbers as many as 35 troupes — a proportionally massive number compared to Albuquerque approximate population of half a million.
Blackout Theatre has a creative core of radical and creative individuals. It resides in the Box performance space located downtown at the corner of Gold Street and Second Street.

Jeff Anderson, the artistic director of Blackout, said Blackout looks to the future of theater for its members as exploring artists. It has offered original works, “The Complete Word of God: Abridged” by the Abridged Shakespeare company, and even “Oleanna” by David Mamet.
Most of what it does is educate. Blackout works with UNM, APS and the greater Albuquerque area offering youth classes and programs and sharing its performance space with Cardboard Playhouse Productions, a children’s theater company.

Anderson seems overwhelmed and invigorated by the growth and success of what began as a pet project with friends.
“What will we do next?” he said. “A musical?  Shakespeare? An early 20th century American classic?  A puppet show?  We aren’t sure, and that’s half the fun!”

When it comes to pulling talent from the UNM and CNM, the Vortex Theatre is indeed a leader of the pack.
Located on 2004 Central Ave., the Vortex Theater would blend in with its unassuming surroundings if not for its trademark spiral.

Like most nonprofit theaters of Albuquerque, the Vortex is small, yet it has powered through hard times because of its persistence. This has allowed them to perform pieces as varied as “Three Sisters,” a play by late 19th century Russian playwright Anton Chekhov, to stage versions of Quentin Tarantino’s “Reservoir Dogs” and Mamet’s “Glengarry Glen Ross,” cheekily nicknamed “Death of a F***in’ Salesman.”
It has just concluded its ambitious “Will Power” Shakespeare fest producing three Shakespeare plays for concurrent three-month runs using dozens upon dozens of actors to fill all the roles.

These theaters have a common passion and a common problem. Clearly, there is creativity and knowledge enough for there to be enough theater to constitute a localized culture for such a powerful medium. Certainly, there is no shortage of theater to enjoy as participant or audience member.

For just a prolific theater town, the theater-going audience of Albuquerque is staggeringly low.
Perhaps the most important communal motion to be undertaken by all is to expand this base by extending simple awareness of the wealth of art our unassuming desert town has to offer.

The idea for new blood is a common one, and is, in contrast to Mamet’s axiom, a defining one.