The Wanton Wind

THE FIRST TIME I watched Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, I was disappointed. The show had been billed as a parody of conventional soap opera; it was supposed to be funny, but I didn't laugh once. In fact, I thought the whole thing was so silly I almost turned off the set; fortunately, my mother, already an addict, wouldn't let me. In an uncharacteristic fit of tolerance, I agreed to give the program another chance. Within a week, I was hooked. I'd watch the show every night, and when friends dropped over, I'd force them to watch with me, hoping I could turn them on to Mary's neuroses. After a while, I even started talking like Mary Hartman.

I liked the show not because it was funny--although it has its share of humor--but because I believed in Mary, and I found her problems real. To me, at least, they didn't seem particularly exaggerated.

It's 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.

In the 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 it. It's bigger than the both of us."

STILL THE SHOW has pretensions to verite. "The Wanton Wind isn't a metaphor for life; it is life," one of its stars insists. That's where the actors themselves come in. If we can't believe totally in The Wanton Wind, can't in the space of the couple of episodes we're presented with begin to empathize with its characters, we still have a chance to 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.

All of 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 as Nancy Ross, the bitchy aging actress, wonders at the extent to which she has merged with the character of Lorna Charles. By the end, it seems as though the actors and the characters they portray on screen/stage are not so distinct after all, that the latter are largely excuses for the former to act out latent dimensions of their own personalities.

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 it and all the appeals for audience participation, we never really do start to care deeply about the characters in either Soap or The Wanton Wind. The night I went the audience voted almost unanimously to cancel the show.

There's something intriguing about Soap. What the show essentially does, however, is to skirt around the 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.