It’s Getting Tired, Mildred (and the Genealogy of the Soap Opera)

This is a public apology — published permanently into the public record for all to see.

Ten years ago a very good friend launched a monthly theatrical series and cast it with about two dozen of my friends and colleagues (some of my best friends among them) and until last month I had never been to see it. I just witnessed the 77th episode last month, which means that I had had 76 — 76! –opportunities to see it, and never managed to get my ass over there. There were legit excuses. Geography was one, especially once I moved out of the city in 2018. Health was another (a bad back has made attending theatre a trial a good bit of the time over the past several years). For long stretches the show ran in a late-night slot, another hurdle when there are distances to travel. Still. You would think with so many chances to see a show, I’d have made it to ONE of them, and within the first couple of years at least! It grew epic, preposterous after a while, and while creator/writer/director/producer Roger Nasser is too sweet a man to ever berate me it became like a lead cross hanging around my neck every time I would see him. It genuinely was bad luck or bad timing most of the time, but I’m sure that after TEN YEARS my excuses were beginning to seem unlikely. Such guilt! Theatre is existential! How can you love someone, and in what way are you even acknowledging their humanity, if you don’t go see their shows???

Haha, you see? DRAMA! It’s all about the drama! I rend my hair because I missed your show, Roger! I gnash my teeth, I plunge a dagger into my heart, I leap from the bridge! We are plainly made of the same stuff.

Still, my appreciation of the form Roger pays tribute to in It’s Getting Tired,Mildred has been belated and partial. I first learned a little about the history of melodrama when I was about 13 years old (yes, I was that young when I took my first theatre history course), but while I knew in my head in some sort of distant way that those TV shows my mother and her friends watched every afternoon were connected to it, my disrespect for soap operas was near total. I found them tedious, repetitive, airless, claustrophobic. There were those long pauses. It wasn’t so much that they were mushy; I’m a sucker for a proper tale of romance. But that’s not what soaps deliver. They offer endless CONVERSATIONS about relationships, and the relationships are all superficial because the characters all commit adultery with the frequency and regularity of the changing moons. Whatever that is, it’s not romance. Basically, everyone goes around having a bad time. And most egregious of all to a word person like myself, the dialogue was not finely wrought or poetic or witty or hilarious or memorable. It was just sort of THERE.

“I heard you had a phone call from David”

“I told him not to call. He called anyway”

“I don’t believe you”

Or whatever. See? I just wrote a soap opera scene! The common wisdom was that it was a form of entertainment for unsophisticated people. So I scorned it. Respect came slowly, mostly by way of human encounters over many decades. When I was at NYU we visited the CBS studios, where I got a close look at soap opera sets, and learned about production. Ten or 20 years ago I got to know a guy pretty well who used to write for soaps, and he gave me some insightful advice about dramatic structure and plotting (it’s been about a decade, but I used to be a playwright who put up at least one play a year, sometimes several). In more recent times, I met a couple of older women who worked on soaps on the production end back in the day, and this is when I finally put the pieces together in a way that clicked for me. Mari Lyn Henry was one of them. She was a scholar and historian of stage melodrama, and she also booked talent for soaps. I knew that the latter had evolved out of the former, but through Mari Lyn’s eyes, I could actually make that connection. And of course, the virtues of the soap opera form are sort of invisible. It has to do with production. The classic daytime soaps are produced DAILY. They are triumphs of organization. They have plots mapped out beforehand, but the scripts are cranked out at an insane rate, just in time to hand off to the actors, who then have to memorize their lines instantly. They block it, they shoot it, they edit it. Then the cycle begins again.

So while one may never be tempted to admire these shows as masterpieces of dramatic art, they actually do carry on several old traditions that have been lost elsewhere. Their methodology is not unlike the old trouping stock companies, which kept a repertory of shows in constant circulation. Such companies might perform a different play every night of the week. To do that you would have to fly by the seat of your pants: learn lines quickly, and be able to improvise when things went wrong just to keep things on track. And while contemporary daytime soaps are taped and edited before they are aired, they are probably closer than anything else still in existence to the live tv dramas of the 1950s of the Playhouse 90 variety.

And of course the evolution of the serial form has a respectable history too. The first radio soap operas started around 1930, but there are older antecedents. For example. In the 19th century lots of novels were initially published in serialized form in periodicals (the novels of Charles Dickens being the best known example). And of course there were movie serials going back to the silent days of the teens. Radio was the first medium that allowed for new installments daily. They were called soap operas because detergents were the sponsors most inclined to advertise to the mostly female audiences. And the melodramatic plots were “sudsy”. In the early days of television, all shows were live, meaning that just about every program had production challenges nearly as difficult as doing a daily soap opera. So there was no hesitancy about adapting the form to the new medium.

I used to guffaw when my mother opined that she preferred soap operas to other genres because they were “true to life”. The laughter was of course because of the endless string of plot contrivances straight out of the old time melodrama: previously unknown children showing up, secret twins, bouts of amnesia, revelations of criminal pasts and other dirty secrets, the advent of rare fatal diseases that are later cured, etc, etc etc. The form is flexible. Some, like Dark Shadows and Twin Peaks would take it much farther, even into the supernatural. But, on the other hand, there are ways in which the soap opera is more efficacious in providing an analog to real life than other forms. The pace of daytime soaps means that dedicated viewers spend time with the characters every single day, about as often as they see friends, family, and coworkers. The open ended nature of the shows means that the audience follows the stories of the characters over periods of years or even decades! There is no other dramatic form that does that.

These days there are only a small handful of daily soaps left. When I was a kid the big ones were All My Children, Another World, As the World Turns, Days of Our Lives, The Edge of Night, General Hospital, The Guiding Light, One Life to Live, Ryan’s Hope, Search for Tomorrow, and The Young and the Restless. Like I say, they weren’t for me. But by the time he was ten, my friend Roger Nasser was performing improvised plotlines for what eventually began It’s Getting Tired, Mildred into a tape recorder. Encouraged by friends, he put it on its feet as a live show at The Brick Theatre starting in 2014.

There was some precedent, by the way. In the early ’90s, my ex and I used to go watch a thing called The Underground Soap at the much missed Cucaracha on Greenwich Street in Tribeca. The Axis Theatre in Sheridan Square had an annual live avant-garde soap opera called Hospital during their summer seasons starting around 1999. And closer to home, Byran Enk’s company Third Lows presented a Gothic monthly serial called Penny Dreadful at the Brick from 2007 to 2009. (I got to play William Randolph Hearst!) Many of the folks from that series, including Enk, helped Roger realize his project and make up part of his cast. A few years ago, they moved to Under St. Marks, the venue run by Frigid New York.

Having now seen it, I can attest that it is a sui generis mix of loving parody, folk art, fan art, camp, indie theatre expectations, and the Real McCoy itself. The show, which is produced monthly but mounted with very little rehearsal, has an exciting seat-of-the-pants air that matches what it’s paying tribute to. It’s almost like a sporting event, to see the gang breathlessly put the thing over. If you pay close attention you’ll witness some glorious, triumphant saves, improvisational coups, when one scene partner or another drops a line and another comes to the rescue. Also Nasser’s writing is funny and strange in the Lynchian mode, not nearly as grim as an actual soap opera.

The next episode unveils tomorrow, and you’d be well advised to get your ticket in advance as they generally sell out the little house (there’s a cult that attends every month). So it’s not getting THAT tired, I guess! I certainly intend to go back — and I vow I won’t let another 76 episodes go by until I do so. Tickets and more info are here.

Break a leg, Mildred Springs!