If you aren’t familiar with West End Productions or haven’t checked out a performance at the North Fourth Theater (4904 Forth St. NW) yet, perhaps it’s time to be enlightened. Beginning on Friday, March 28 and running until April 13, the theater company brings David Hare’s Skylight to the Griegos Neighborhood in Albuquerque and showcases some of the city’s brightest actors. The play is a love story — and maybe a love letter to the ’90s — but hiding under the romance and the humor is an important message about materialism and lingering attitudes involving class and capitalism that we only thought went out of style when we stashed away our Walkmans and stopped using the Yellow Pages.
“When I read Skylight, I was immediately captivated by David Hare’s writing,” Director Colleen Neary McClure says. “He is a word master, in my opinion. His writing is witty and intricate, and he weaves in and out of a tapestry of human emotion.”
A Touch of Class
Skylight premiered at the National Theatre in 1995 and ran in London’s West End in 1996 before coming to Broadway. The play, its director and the actors won Lawrence Olivier Awards in the UK including Play of the Year as well as the New York Drama Critics’ Circle award for Best Foreign Play. McClure says Skylight is about “family ties and a quest to reach out to others less fortunate.” The three-actor production set in the ’90s revolves around wealthy restaurateur Tom Sergeant and poor school teacher Kyra Hollis, former lovers attempting to rekindle a romance they once had. Instead, they find themselves locked in a battle of opposing ideologies and mutual desires. Despite having a tremendous amount of love and respect for each other, the outcome doesn’t prove promising.
“Tom basically tells [Kyra], ‘Why do you choose to teach in this impoverished environment when you’re a highly educated woman? You could be a businesswoman, you could be anything you wanted to be,’” McClure says. “Kyra says, ‘It’s because I’m educated that I can do this.’”
Tom and Kyra are played by Matt Heath and Rachel Foster, two local actors McClure calls a “tour de force.” She says the characters’ conflicting ideologies are relevant to the play, particularly during Kyra’s speeches defending her belief in helping those less fortunate. But she doesn’t want audiences to think Skylight is a political play. Rather, the play is an “emotional roller coaster” involving two intellectual equals with very different values. And the best part of the ride is Heath and Foster’s powerful and sometimes humorous performances as they attempt to keep their love from going off the rails.
“They are not to be missed,” McClure says. “They bring life, perhaps even ‘sunlight’ into Kyra’s gloomy apartment.”
From London to Burque
McClure is the artistic director and a founding member of West End Productions. She’s been in the theater game for 40 years and fittingly got her start in London’s West End, the city’s commercial and entertainment district that McClure calls England’s “equivalent to Broadway.” In the States, McClure worked as director of performing arts for 17 years at Albuquerque’s Bosque School and brought Shakespeare to life for 8th-graders through activities such as performing scenes at different locations throughout the riverside landscapes that make up Sanchez Park and the surrounding Bosque wilderness. In 2025 Albuquerque’s West End Productions celebrates ten years of bringing theater from England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales to New Mexico. McClure says they have been running plays at North Fourth Theater for nine of the ten years they have been operating.
“We specialize in bringing plays from the United Kingdom that have rarely — if ever — been seen before in Albuquerque. I started the company because I was so missing my roots, and I wanted to share what I love with this city,” she says.
Maybe McClure has a bit more in common with Kyra than she does with Tom; she certainly wants to share her passion for the stage with young people and the local community. She says these days she enjoys sharing a creative space with the Albuquerque Sign Language Academy (ASLA), a tuition-free charter school that is currently leasing the North Fourth Theater and remains committed to allowing companies like West End Productions to bring plays like Skylight to Duke City audiences. The school is set directly behind the theater, so students use the space for art projects and, more recently, performance projects such as last September’s production of Home, I’m Darling.
“They’re an amazing school to work with,” she says. “We’re very excited to collaborate with them and very excited that the theater is still being used to benefit our city and the hearing impaired.”
For show information and individual or season tickets, visit westendproductions.org or call (505) 460-4823. Discounted tickets are available for military members, TALC and Sag-Aftra members and students. Remember to please bring your ID.
Skylight
March 28 – April 13
North Fourth Theater
4904 Fourth St. NW
$24