Word: soap
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...Jerusalem Disease was neither wonderfully performed nor exceptionally well-written; instead it was a very watcheable soap-opera: "Dawson's Creek" featuring skinny guys in tassel loafers. In fine post-adolescent form, the play melodramatizes the trivial and passes lightly over the truly significant. It is hard to imagine anybody in the audience actually caring about the conflicts the play poses; even the protagonists seem strangely nonchalant about what would strike most mature people as the play's central conflict--an alleged teenage suicide--preferring instead to fight about who is dating whom and what pain is caused...
...soap-opera, the conflicts in The Jerusalem Disease are simple and easy to identify with, especially for a college audience: the protagonists are boys just out of high school struggling with the questions of adjustment to adult life and the formation of adult identities. But, also as in a soap-opera, the setting is unusual enough to excite the audience to interest; in the case of most television teen soap-operas, what makes the setting unusual is a remarkably generalized beauty, a kind of atmospheric attractiveness that immediately romanticizes the proceedings, however trivial. Here, there's a quite different kind...
This energy owes much to the script, whichwisely--in the best teen soap-operatradition--does not dwell for too long on anyparticular mini-conflict but also to the actors,who as a group were much better with movement andmelodramatic expressions of emotion than withsubtle feeling and delivery. Matt MacInnis '02(playing Jason Rosner) is a very good andconvincing screamer; Henley-Cohn is a fine stagepresence, and has a considerable amount of(misplaced, in this play) sex appeal; and JayChaffin '00 (as the rebellious Elliot Dachs, butreminiscent of nobody more than Seinfeld's George)has a very good sense of comic...
...mere six days into the brand-spanking-new NBA season, the basketball league-cum-soap opera I've come to know and resent is up to its old tricks...
While still in high school, Hill landed a recurring role as the troubled runaway, Kira, on the TV soap As The World Turns. In 1993 she was cast as a difficult teen in Sister Act 2. There's a scene in that film in which Hill's character reels off a rap as her classmates look on. "None of that was scripted," says director Bill Duke. "That was all Lauryn. She was amazing." While in high school, she formed the rap trio the Fugees (short for refugees) with classmate Prakazrel ("Pras") Michel and Wyclef Jean, who went to a nearby...