This is a terrific essay by Jake Silbermann. The interesting thing about it is that it gives you some insight from an actor’s point of view. Silbermann is pointing out something that is patently obvious to many of us but that seems completely revelatory to so many others; and that’s simply that “gay” and “straight” aren’t character traits.
Jake Silbermann as Noah Mayer (r) opposite Van Hansis as Luke Snyder on As The World Turns. The two became American daytime television’s first gay supercouple and were central to the storyline of the soap for the last several years that the show was on the air.
The sad part is that so many casting agents haven’t figured this out yet. And far too many agents are still of the old, old school where they counsel their gay clients not to take “gay roles” and they counsel their straight clients not to take them either because of the “fear,” as Silbermann points out of being typecast.
Hard to believe this question is still asked because “gay” isn’t a character trait anymore than straight is. Can you be type cast as straight? It may be that when we meet a new character on screen or stage, we assume they are heterosexual, but we don’t know who they are to the story. Is this the hero, best friend, love interest, antagonist, etc.? “Gay” is not a negative or a positive. It’s not descriptive. It’s really more of a circumstance, albeit a vital one. The point is being gay is not character defining.
Silbermann is a fine actor. He was terrific on the soap and he’s fast becoming a go-to actor in the theatre. He’s currently in Richard Greenberg’s Assembled Parties on Broadway. I haven’t seen this piece yet, but Greenberg is a playwright who relies on smart actors. You don’t get good notices in a Greenberg piece if you’re not a smart, savvy actor.
In addition to the Kickstarter that Silbermann talks about in this essay, he also wrote and co-starred in a fine short film called Stuffer a few years back. If you only knew him from his TV work, this piece instantly showed off his broad range.
(4.29.13) — Today is Welcome Back to Pine Valley Day. (Or if your preference is just down the road, it’s Welcome Back to Llanview Day.) It’s the day that the Internet reboot of All My Children and One Life to Live begins.
It took me awhile, but I pinpointed my first viewing of AMC to the spring of 1982. I was a senior in high school and I had been, since before I even knew any better, a viewer of CBS soap operas — As The World Turns and Guiding Light, specifically. I couldn’t help it. That’s what my mother and my aunt and my grandmother watched. I couldn’t go anywhere, it seemed, during my childhood without having a CBS soap playing in the background.
That spring, a friend of mine called me on some holiday from school and demanded I turn on All My Children. (There was a lot of watching television while on the telephone in those days; just go with it.) She said that I had to watch this one crazy character because it reminded her of her mother. The actress was Dorothy Lyman, the role was Opal Gardner, and I thought it was hilarious. (And yes, Opal was a lot like her mother, as scary as that may be to contemplate.)
If Opal, Glamorama and all, got me to open the door, the rich, multi-generational tapestry of characters in Pine Valley invited me to the party and demanded that I pull up a chair.
The cast of the “new” All My Children includes many familiar faces, including original AMC cast member Ray MacDonnell and longtime co-stars Cady McClain, Jill Larson, David Canary, Julia Barr and others. Image: Ferencomm/The Online Network.
Creepy Billy Clyde Tuggle, assayed brilliantly by Matthew Cowles.
Watching AMC in those days was not just about watching the hot youngsters —Jenny and Greg and Angie and Jesse and Tad and Liza — it was also about watching Benny Sago spar with “The Duchess,” the one and only Phoebe Tyler, it was about the Charles/Mona/Phoebe triangle, it was about Langley and Phoebe and Myrtle and Opal, it was about hooker-with-a-heart-o’gold Donna Beck and Chuck Tyler, it was about Erica Kane and Tom Cudahy, Brooke English and Tom Cudahy, Palmer Cortlandt before Adam Chandler came to town, Nina and Cliff, Ellen and Mark, Joe and Ruth and Grandma Kate Martin, the best soap opera villain ever, Billy Clyde Tuggle. And “Bonkers.”
Great memories of stories well-told, but they are the stuff of television lore. They are the stuff of history as much as this iconic show opening:
When ABC announced the cancellation of AMC, I started to watch it again. I hadn’t watched much in the decade before the cancellation and I have it on pretty good authority that it was nothing like the Agnes Nixon-penned salad days of the 70s and 80s. The first thing I noticed was that Tad Martin had grey hair! Tad the Cad got old? What the hell? I just couldn’t get over that. I mentioned it to a friend and fellow viewer. He suggested that I should look in the mirror. Oh. According to the AMC bible, Tad and I are the same age. Dammit.
Still, I can mourn my lost youth, I suppose, but, then again, I don’t actually want to see the same things I saw in 1983. I don’t want to watch the same stories again and again. I want to be excited about new stories and new ideas. Isn’t that really the point?
(And the other point is that Michael E. Knight and I both aged gracefully and we still look fabulous, grey hair and all!)
Anyhow, today is a new day in Pine Valley. Like Brigadoon, it’s risen again and is ready to let us in. Maybe some of your old favorites won’t be there. Maybe you’ll be looking for The Goalpost or the Valley Inn or the Glamorama. Maybe they won’t be there either. But just like in1970 at the first beginning, Joe Martin will be there (God bless Ray MacDonnell!!).
Dixie Cooney will be there. And Opal Cortlandt. And Jesse and Angie Hubbard. And Brooke English and Adam Chandler. And a whole lot of young people that you don’t know yet. And that shouldn’t scare you away. That should excite you. It’s a new day. In the world and in Pine Valley.
Oft-repeated through the years — and for awhile seen in the opening credits, I believe — is the poem from Agnes Nixon’s AMC bible:
The Great and the Least,
The Rich and the Poor,
The Weak and the Strong,
In Sickness and in Health,
In Joy and Sorry,
In Tragedy and Triumph,
You are All My Children.
Nixon’s All My Children has always been about just those things. Today, they begin telling new stories in a new medium with both familiar and new faces just like always. I have a feeling this day may mark the beginning of a new day of serialized storytelling in this country. That hope — that we can again tune in tomorrow — or at four a.m. or watch from our phone on the train on the way home from the office — makes this a very good day indeed.
__________________
The incomparable Ruth Warrick.
P.S. — I spent many years of my working life in the theatre. I don’t get star struck. I have met and worked with many famous personages, but my autograph collection is very, very small. The only person from a daytime drama I have ever deliberately sought out to meet and to sign an autograph was the late Ruth Warrick. I thought she was an absolutely brilliant actress and there have been very, very few characterizations ever that rose to the rarified level of Phoebe English Tyler Wallingford.
Would that the ‘Duchess’ could see Pine Valley reborn. I’m certain that she and the rest of the Daughters of Fine Lineage would be pleased!
All My Children’s Cady McClain (Dixie, for those in the know) in the guise of Web advice guru Suzy F*cking Homemaker explains how to watch All My Children when it debuts online later this month. Even if you don’t watch AMC, you should watch this!
Kit Williamson and Van Hansis star as Cal and Thom in the new web series “Eastsiders.” Watch at http://www.eastsiderstv.com
Awesome. Truly awesome. I can’t wait for this series to come to a larger platform. And I can’t wait until they finish shooting the season! Great stuff. Watch it if you haven’t already. Here’s a LINK to get you started.
Emmy Award-winning actress Cady McClain returns to serial drama and to one of her signature roles, Dixie Cooney Martin on the online reboot of All My Children. Photo: cadymcclain.com.
Here’s a cut from Cady McClain. It’s a terrific piece and any soap fan should take a few moments and read it and think about what she’s saying.
I want to talk about the new young people on All My Children, and why I think (and hope) the audience should give them a chance. I am not known for blowing smoke up anybodies hoo-ha, right? Let’s just start with that as a baseline for this conversation!
Alert readers will not be surprised at all to learn that I am an enormous fan of continuing drama and what a powerful medium I believe it to be. I also believe that we are just at the beginning of a new era wherein we can harness the Internet as a new platform to tell stories. We don’t know quite how to do it yet, and that makes it exciting. It’s just as exciting as when the pioneers of television — like Irna Phillips — were figuring out how to take Papa Bauer’s family from mythical radio Springfield to mythical television Springfield and make The Guiding Light into a television program that viewers watched.
Phillips had two protégés in those early television days — William J. Bell and Agnes Nixon. And as influential as Phillips was in early television, one could argue that Agnes Nixon has an even more powerful legacy of harnessing the power of continuing drama to tell stories that have tremendous social impact. In 1962, Nixon penned the story of Bert Bauer’s cancer scare on The Guiding Light, before you could say “cancer,” “uterus,” or “Pap smear” on television. On Another World, she created young troublemaker Rachel Davis, who was seen by many as the prototype for her most famous creation, Erica Kane on her landmark serial All My Children.
Erica Kane (Martin Brent Cudahy Chandler [almost Roy] Montgomery Montgomery Chandler Marrick Marrick Montgomery) is the most popular character in the history of daytime drama in the U.S. Erica lied, cheated, cajoled, married, married, loved, lost, shocked the world, forced a bear to stand down, had daytime’s first legal abortion and, after 41 years on the air, she was still the most fascinating character ever created for television.
Skip to the point, please.
Fine. Here it is: people get wrapped up in soap operas. People begin to think of actors as the characters they play because they see them in their homes every single day. People get crazy obsessed. People don’t like some things ever to change.
Cady is making a tremendous case for the young people who are new to playing characters established in the previous broadcast incarnation of All My Children. She’s saying, “Approach this with an open mind. It’s different. But it’s good.” What I’m saying is a little less nice. I’m saying, “Change happens. Get the hell over it.” And if you can’t, don’t watch.
Eighty-five year old Agnes Nixon is working her ass off to deliver a product, a powerful story, in an untested medium. Prospect Park is investing millions of dollars in this experiment. Cady McClain and many of the “old guard” actors are putting their careers on the line for this new venture. The least you can do, if you are, in fact, a fan of All My Children, is to watch with an open mind. You might learn something. You might enjoy it.
And if you don’t? If this venture fails? Well, at least they tried. That’s what artists and innovators do. They try. Again and again and again. And no one thanks them enough for being fearless enough to try.
Good article in The Guardian about the proliferation of gay-themed content in web series and how this might be the next new content delivery method for this type of entertainment. (Duh.) As Husbands co-creator Jane Espenson says, “We consider Husbands television. It’s just television that arrives in a different box.”
Some us have been ahead of The Guardian in reporting this. Ahem. See many links below. H/T Tommy Heleringer’s Facebook.
(l-r) Hunter Canning, Sasha Winters and Adam Goldman star in the exceptional Web series, The Outs. Photo: Interview/Unusually Fine Photography
Good God. Really? Thirty years? I have a story about this….
I was a freshman in college. My roommate and I had a television — my television — a small back-and-white set from Sears, complete with CABLE (we were on the cutting edge of high tech!!) in our dorm room!
A bunch of friends gathered in our room that night to watch the finale and say goodbye to Hawkeye and BJ and Col. Potter and Klinger and the rest of the 4077th, characters that had defined our childhoods. And just as the program began, the geeks next door, geeks with no sense of collective pop culture, but geeks with a dial-up handset modem for their handmade “computer” fired that sucker up and wrecked our signal. We went crazy, beating on their door, screaming for them to turn it off.
They finally did and declined our invitation to watch with us; perhaps the only people in America that night not tuned in to see the goings-on in “The Swamp” one last time.
Michael E. Knight and Cady McClain as Tad and Dixie on ABC’s “All My Children.” The show returns online next month as one of two former network serials getting another life online. McClain returns to her Emmy Award-winning role as Dixie in the reboot. No word yet on Knight’s participation. Image: originally SoapNet, via Wikimedia Commons. No copyright claimed.
If you know the actress Cady McClain, you are likely a viewer of serial drama. She rocketed to the top of the daytime drama Hot Character Hall of Fame for her portrayal of Dixie Cooney Martin on All My Children on and off from 1988 to the end of the ABC series in 2011. She is also known as the second Rosanna Cabot on As The World Turns in multiple stints for the last eight years that soap was on the air.
McClain returns to Pine Valley as, in classic soap fashion, it rises from the dead for an Internet reboot from the production company Prospect Park and their Online Network. The show will also be available on Hulu and iTunes in 30-minute episodes.
It’s a brave new world for what we used to call “daytime drama,” but dramatic programming on the networks during the day is flagging as the core audience — stay-at-home moms and other women who do not work outside the home — continues to dwindle.
I’ve written any number of times about my feelings about serial drama and how important it can be as a catalyst for societal change. I hope that by making the once venerable and still much-loved serials All My Children and One Life to Live available online, we are seeing the beginnings of a more mainstream acceptance of Web-based entertainment.
Read Cady’s cut below and feel free to click around to stories that I’ve written (or reblogged) about soaps and Web series over the last year or so. A New Dawn for Daytime | Cady McClain.
Do you remember when your aunt or grandma or mom called you into the living room to look at her soap opera on the TV, screaming, “OH MY GOD YOU’VE GOT TO SEE THIS” and that moment when you frantically queried, “What’s happening? Who is that? TELL ME EVERYTHING!” Well the same thing is going to happen, only now it might be in reverse. Your niece or daughter, or grand daughter might now be the one hollering, “OMG! You’ve got to see this!” while pulling out her laptop, tablet, or smart phone. It’s not so different: it’s still a generational connection that is going to occur, it’s just coming to you via a different mechanism.
One Last Word 