Word: soaping
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...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...
...worry about the future of the actors who play them. As it turns out, though, they are hardly less one-dimensional or stylized than their roles; the aging star, the actor who isn't quite good enough, the spoiled young ingenue--these are characters almost as much out of soap opera as The Wanton Wind's parade of adulterers and illegitimate offspring...
...which may be very much to the point. Where finally, Soap asks, does life end, and art--given that soap opera is art--begin? Soap seems intent on demonstrating how blurred the separation between the two can become. At one point, one of the actors asks the audience to set the scene for the meeting of a Breezewood character and one of the members of the company--as though such a meeting were in fact possible. And in the show's final soliloquy, the eradication of the line between art and life is given psychological--as well as sociological--significance...
These suggestions are interesting, to be sure, but the missing link in writer/director Allan Albert's equation is the audience. Despite a series of strong performances from the Proposition's capable ensemble, Soap is limited by its format. All the humor comes from one-liners and burlesque; it doesn't well up from our recognition of ourselves in the people who act out their lives before us. There are moments of dramatic tension in the actors' recognition of their dependence on the show. But, with all the switching about from the play-within-a-play to the action which frames...