TRASHVISION!
Well, yes, sadly. At least I can. Two generations of TV have bred a public that’s at once cynical and gullible. We love to mock the idiots on our home screens, yet we’re inclined to believe them too–if only because we want to believe in the false security they offer as they tell us of other people’s troubles. Even bad news sells in a medium that compresses information, entertainment, and advertising into one slick and hypnotic home-viewing experience.
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Playwright VanMatre stars in the program’s opening piece, The Birthday Present, by Charlie Schulman. Despite some strained efforts to update the play with references to Barbara Bush and her dog Millie, this is clearly a product of the early Reagan years, with references to an attempted presidential assassination and the Berlin Wall. Its premise recalls the inane fare so prevalent on movie and TV screens in the early 1980s: Wallace, a young man whose scientist father conducted secret experiments on him when he was a child, finds that he’s the only man safe from a mysterious worldwide infertility epidemic. When news of his potency hits the airwaves, this shy, sweet nerd quickly becomes the most unlikely media sex symbol since Tiny Tim married Miss Vicky on Johnny Carson’s show.
