Reading is not my middle name, though it could be.

The advent of the internet accelerated this passion, but there are still many and notable times when I peruse magazines, books and newspapers. Newspapers I read the least, owing to the fact that what is written about in them is too far removed from what is happening now. Online, as far as the news is concerned, it is always now.

In any event, yesterday, I stumbled onto an actual newspaper.

A copy of the Albuquerque Journal lay on a coffee table in the lobby at my workplace. It seemed to have been abandoned. It really looked lonely. I am not kidding.

I imagined, though I have recently come to believe in the obsolescence of newspapers, that this object desired to be read and would feel dejected otherwise.

So, I sat down and began to leaf through it. Turning to the Op-Ed page, I marked and read a letter to the editor. The letter led my mind towards a sort of fearsome yet funny deconstruction that I will recount here.

The headline read, “Local Theater ‘Anti-Normality’ “. The epistle’s writer (Clyde Aragon) went on to describe his distaste for the Albuquerque theater scene. He wrote, and I quote, “the problem, it just seems, is that most theaters nowadays are run by liberals and socialists who only have a childlike grasp of social, political and economic issues and wish to display that ignorance with horrendously inane, suffocating, and intellectually-masturbatory plays”.

Well, the first part of that last sentence is just fine with me. The second part though was a bit disturbing. Humans who have the ability to ascribe the terms liberal and socialist to themselves are rarely childlike: such class consciousness requires some sort of education, if only to deduce the meanings of words like “liberal" and “socialist”. Personally, I find intellectual masturbation to be a rewarding hobby.

He complained that current productions here offered “lesbians and a rehash of Willy Wonka” He said, in spite of this, “Shakespeare endures”.

Willy the Shakes endures because he learned to play, audaciously, with language. He was also deliciously deviant and complex. Wasn’t Wonka, after all, sort of Puckish? Further, a 2001 study that I read about in the Guardian posits that many of the bard’s heroines are secretly sapphic.

I should admit, here, that I’ve had more than casual contact with the Albuquerque theater. Not like that, but none the less intimate. I worked as a stage hand at Popejoy Hall when Bill Martin and W. Georg Shrieber were at the helm. In 1994, I designed the lights for a production of Macbeth at the Vortex. And so on. Sometime in 1996, I met some people that had formed a group called Tricklock.

They took me up to a cabin in Northern New Mexico where I met with their wise and brilliant mentor. We spoke while listening to Rachmaninoff (I was interested in working with them, but never followed through. I went to Nepal, instead).

Aragon asserted that the American theater is a “ghost of its former glory”, but I got to break bread with American theater, in all of its glory.

Though I don’t do theater anymore, its spirit has not left me, nor will it. This past Christmas-time, I saw a production of a David Sedaris one-act at the Box Performance Space. It was absolutely high-larious. The play was performed by Ross Kelly, who also designed and built the sets. The acting was superb and the sets were beautiful.

I know that doesn’t make me an expert on theater. But, it does confirm my belief that the theater and its community are a bright and vibrant force in this town.

Aragon also wrote that he has yet to hear anyone speaking of looking forward to going to the theater in this town. You should stop by my house sometime, Mr. Aragon: not only do we talk about theater here and there, we have plenty of books filled with plays. I can’t ever read through them all, no matter how challenging the dialog or mystical the setting, though I am compelled to do so. We could even have ourselves a good ol’ fashioned cold reading; although, I must admit that your missive has chilled my soul, which has lost it brevity, though not its wit, on your account.