Word: hartmans
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Last Wednesday's vote at the Graduate School of Design denying "remedial action" to Chester A. Hartman '57, effectively ends Hartman's seven-year battle for redress of his non-hiring, which he has alleged was based on his leftist political beliefs...
...hardly surprising that Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, whatever Norman Lear's original intent, didn't end up as pure parody. Soap operas as a genre already verge on self-parody; the swelling music, anguished faces, mystifying plot complications and sexual entanglements all represent exaggerations of the vicissitudes of life on the other side of the screen. Parodying parody is a difficult business at best, and why bother when you can go parody one up and deliver instead what the New York Times Magazine called "the ultimate slice of life...
Soap, the Proposition's new revue, attempts to pick up where Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman leaves off. Using a play-within-a-play format, it not only burlesques the conventions of daytime drama; it also tries to explore what soap opera as an art form means to both its actors and its audience...
...process, Soap breaks down the barriers between the two. The patrons of the Proposition Theater temporarily become the viewers of a daytime drama called The Wanton Wind, whose renewal or cancellation depends on their whim. The Wanton Wind has obvious parallels with Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman; it is set, for example, in Breezewood (instead of Fernwood), and its young Don Juan, Brent Owen, resembles Sgt. Dennis Foley. But The Wanton Wind is pure parody in a way Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman is not--highly stylized, it comes complete with musical flourishes, tensely meaningful looks and lines like "Don't fight...
...edge of some rather vexing philosophical questions; the only definite answers it gives--that soap opera is a fix, and that we all need it, the audience as well as the people who act in it--aren't particularly original or hard to come by. After watching Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman for three months, I could have told you as much myself...