‘Three: A One Act Play’

THERE IS A FREE theater performance happening in Taos at the Taos Center for the Arts theatre, 145 Paseo del Pueblo Norte. “Three: A One Act Play” written and directed by George Schaub, opens Wednesday (Aug. 4) at 5 p.m. According to the TCA press release, Three is about “a dreamer in despair who is visited by two aspects who offer hints on how to dance in a solar system without the burden of always acting like its sun. Responding to the dreamer’s resistance and denials, the visitors offer admonitions, inspirations and even reason, but when an arriving spirit poses a simple solution, will the dreamer take the chance?”

Three showcases local talent Mark Jackson, Rick Aragon, Paula Claycomb, Susan Mihalic and Nancy Glasgow. George Schaub is a “photographer, author, editor and educator from New York with longtime ties to Taos. He has taught at The New School and Parsons School of Design, both in New York City, and has written over 20 books on photography. His work has been exhibited all over the country.” In 2019, his show ‘Three Visions,’ which featured contemporary modern abstract photography styles, was on view at Taos Historic Museums.

Tempo caught up with the busy playwright and asked a few questions. Here are the highlights.

Some say writing a play is the most difficult of the writing disciplines to do well. You’ve written several books about photography. What sparked the inner playwright?

As a kid I always dreamed of being a writer, and at one point promised myself that I’d make a living with just a backpack, a notebook and a pen. Of course, it got more complicated than that. My photography books are about the technique and aesthetics of making pictures and prints, which allowed me to illustrate the text with my own images.

I have written a few novels (selfpublished) and have always done short stories, so for me a play is a way of illustrating a story in 3D. It’s a way of making characters and situations come alive in your head and projecting them out in concrete fashion. I have always loved theater and thought it would be an interesting form to explore. This piece is in part based on a short story I wrote while sitting under an umbrella in a cafe on a rainy day in Maastricht, the Netherlands.

There are many creatives in Taos who balance their lives between NYC and Taos. How does it work for you?

It’s all good. I moved from New York to Connecticut a few years back, but it’s still a commute for me, which of course was cut short by the pandemic. I have had a home in Taos since 1990 because I fell in love with it when I first came here in ‘83 on a freelance writing assignment. That’s when I first met Bill and Audrey Davis; I was married in their backyard, and was fortunate to meet new friends and artists through the years. In short, the New York thing was making a living; the Taos thing was being alive. Now that I’m out of harness I travel extensively, but Taos is always first on the itinerary.

Can art save us?

Yikes! My first response would be: From what? To me, art is not the act of making a picture or writing a story, but the experience of doing so, and not getting hung up on what made you snap the shutter or pick up the pen at the moment of creation. The resultant images and words are byproducts of experience; art is being open to receiving the light or hearing the words. So, to save each of us as individuals, and shaping our collective consciousness, art as affirmation is imperative. But it won’t solve world hunger, solve the climate crisis or bring peace. We only have one chance at life and art is a pretty good way of being present while we’re still kicking around.

Why should our readers come see your play?

Well, the players are part of the Taos scene and good friends in the bargain. The play itself is a dream sequence that deals with caution, doubt and what Sartre called ‘troubled sleep.’ These issues might be unique to my experience, but I doubt it, and the play offers a dialog between “aspects of self” that wrestle with them. I guess there’s no great moral lesson here, just to be in the present, let it go, and drop the weight of illusion that keeps us walled off from others and our own experience of being alive.

For tickets and more information about performances at the TCA visit