Clifton Chadwick and Micah Linford

That particular war of aggression, from 1846 to 1848, was a turning point in the history of New Mexico. It was also a decisive time in the biography of Henry David Thoreau, the idealist, naturalist and Transcendentalist philosopher who is the subject of a thought-provoking play that opened at the Adobe Theater in Albuquerque last weekend.

The jumping-off point for The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail is when he chose to be incarcerated rather than pay a $1 poll tax that could have supported that war. When this play was written in 1969 (and first performed in Washington, D.C. in 1970), there were many people who were looking for a way to oppose a war that was on its way to becoming nearly as unpopular as the Mexican War. The Vietnam conflict thus gave new currency to events that had transpired more than a century earlier. Today, as the United States struggles to disentangle itself from unpopular wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and is moving into a new war in Syria, the ugly aroma of past conflicts, the moral dilemmas they posed, and the ways people chose to oppose them remain vital chapters in American history.

Director George A. Williams said he has wanted to stage this play ever since he first saw it in 1971. Introducing the play, he notes that, between the end of the Revolution in 1783 and the beginning of the Mexican War in 1846, the U.S. was involved in a dozen armed conflicts. This state of almost perpetual war sets the stage for the dramatic conflicts that develop during the course of the play.

The most poignant of these conflicts is between the youthful Thoreau, powerfully and beautifully realized by Micah Linford, who takes possession of the stage from the opening scene and never relinquishes it, and the older and far more famous and successful Ralph Waldo Emerson, whom Clifton Chadwick depicts as something like Shakespeare's Polonius, a man so full of his own wisdom that he teeters on the cliff edge of pomposity without quite taking the fall that some may feel he deserves.

Emerson is Thoreau's friend and mentor. He is also his foil. Thoreau's idealism, activism and risk taking is opposed to Emerson's caution, pragmatism and, in the final result, inertia. It is the kind of battle fought out every day in American culture and politics between those who do and those who talk about doing. It is the kind of battle that must play out diurnally, even hourly, in the mind of a man like Barack Obama, who combines in one person the idealism of Thoreau and the pragmatism and caution of Emerson.

Thoreau has a lot of biting things to say about myriad topics that are of importance today, from retirement and racism to war and environmentalism. Written by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee (who also wrote Auntie Mame and Inherit the Wind), the play cleverly melds together many of the actual words of Thoreau and Emerson with the playwrights' own words couched in 19th-century rhythms. Among the most famous and still powerful words these antagonists hurl at each other like spears are these:.

"Why are you in jail?" Emerson asks Thoreau.

"Why aren't you in jail?" Thoreau replies to his friend.

The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail continues 7:30 p.m. Fridays-Saturdays and 2 p.m. Sundays through February 1, 2015, at the Adobe Theater, 9813 4th St. NW in Albuquerque. An additional performance Thursday, January 22 will be pay what you will. For reservations, email email info@adobetheater.org or call 898-9222. For more information www.adobetheater.org.

Photo: George A. Williams

--Wally Gordon