Past Reviews

Regional Reviews: Albuquerque/Santa Fe


Regional Reviews

From feminism to freedom
Rapture, Blister, Burn

Aux Dog

Also see Dean's review of My Favorite Year


Over the past year or so I have been writing a series of linked short stories on the subject of freedom—secretly finding it and unexpectedly losing it, confusing its reality and its illusion, thinking you have it when you actually don't, mourning its loss when in fact you have unknowingly found it. I have discovered to my surprise how complex, ambiguous but endlessly fascinating freedom is. After all, we Americans use the word freedom probably more frequently and more diversely than any other abstraction in the English language.

My reaction to a challenging and ambitious new play, Rapture, Blister, Burn at the Aux Dog Theatre in Albuquerque, is in a similar vein. When, in the final moments of the play, three generations of women raise their glasses to toast freedom, what do they mean? "You're free," they tell each other. One of them, however, is an elderly woman who will continue to grow old alone. Her daughter is a successful professional woman who will return to her life in New York without a child or a lover. Their 21-year-old friend and guru is leaving college because the campus is shadowed by a lost love.

So in what way are these women free? For them, is freedom mere self-delusion or, worse, sour grapes? Is it settling for what little you can get out of life? I think not. The freedom they are toasting is real. It is the freedom to choose to be yourself, not to feel compelled to make yourself over in some artificial image. This is a strange, contradictory notion of freedom, but nevertheless it is freedom. Maybe we can be only what we are, but in accepting what we are with a kind of joyfulness, we can have a fulfilling life. It is not a bad lesson to learn.

The same lesson is carried out by the play's other two characters, a traditional stay-at-home mom and and her easygoing husband. The mom flirts with a life of freedom and autonomy in the big city. Her lackadaisical husband, the only man in the play, tries on the role of an ambitious writer. Both ultimately accept what they are. The efforts of the characters to remake themselves—"thinking about the life not lived," as one puts it—reach their apogee when the mom and the professional woman briefly decide to switch lives, but in ultimately returning to their own lives, they find a freedom they had previously overlooked.

On the most overt level, this is a play about feminism and how it has evolved, or failed to evolve, over the past half-century. Much of the play is taken up with a discussion among the four women of what feminism means to these three generations. In an unusual twist, the one who seems to have the surest grasp on what it means to be a woman is the youngest of the group.

Such an extended conversation on so abstract a concept could have been sterile but isn't, because it is not merely intellectual but grounded in the real life dilemmas of the four women.

The ensemble cast is of a high quality, with the laid-back professionalism of Ryan Montenery as Don Harper and and Gail Gillock Spidle as Alice Croll balanced against the emotional intensity of Sheridan Johnson as Catherine Croll, Jessica Osbourne as Gwen Harper, and Sara Rosenthal as Avery Willard. The play is directed with care and intelligence by Kristine Holtveldt. Playwright Gina Gionfriddo wraps her seriousness of purpose in light and witty prose.

The Aux Dog theater in Nob Hill has a record of taking chances on edgy, thought-provoking plays, and it has successfully done so once again in this Southwest premiere of a play that was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. The language and themes of the play, including discussion of pornography, masturbation and sadism, suggest it should be for adult audiences.

The show continues through March 9, 2014, Fridays and Saturdays at 8 p.m. and Sundays at 2 p.m. Call 505-254-7716 or visit https://www.auxdog.com/ for tickets and more information.

--Wally Gordon