HOME (1968) BY MEGAN TERRY – FORGOTTEN TELEVISION

HOME aka Future Soap (1968) – This science fiction drama set hundreds of years in the future first aired on January 19th, 1968 on American Public Broadcasting’s N.E.T. Playhouse. Home is a 90-minute piece about the threat of overpopulation – and the excuses that threat gives the government to impose authoritarian conditions on the populace – set among a honeycomb of claustrophobic rooms in which citizens of the future must spend their lives due to the dictates of the government.

They are born in, live in and work in these small chambers, own nothing and are forbidden to travel.

Food is in pill form, rituals praising the government are required and “happy drugs” must be consumed daily in order to keep the populace in line. When a couple is able to obtain permission to have a child they must wait until someone in their communal room dies. 

The work was written by Megan Terry (at right), a founding member of the Open Theater in 1963, who was also noted for her 1966 anti-war musical Viet Rock. That production is by many considered to be the first true rock musical made for the stage.

Home centers around the nine characters who live in one of the cramped rooms in question. Edward Winter plays George, Dennis Patrick plays Bert, Joel Fabiani plays John, Jenn Benn-Yakov is Marcia, Dixie Marquis is Cynthia, Roger Davis plays Roy, Irene Dailey plays the potentially violent Ruth, Louise Latham is Shami, and Jacque Lynn Colton portrays Sharon. 

Other cast members included Leon B. Stevens as the authoritarian Central Control, Brett Morrison as a reporter and Clement Fowler as the dissident fugitive who complicates life for our nine leads. Glenn Jordan directed.

Reviewer Jack Gould praised Home, calling it “a compelling mood piece” and writing “Miss Terry made Star Trek and most other science fiction on TV seem like child’s play.” As the story progresses, it becomes clear that an unrelenting population explosion has reduced the world to this nightmarish, “beyond Soylent Green” level of existence. 

The carrot forever dangled before the people to make them accept the stick of the dictatorial government is a claim that space explorers are still trying to find other planets capable of sustaining human life. When (if ever) that held-out hope is realized then many Earth people can be moved to those new worlds.

Meanwhile, Home or Future Soap explores the issues of population control, privacy, government control of all media, laws limiting the number of children that married couples may have and the crushing of individualism. Some aspects of the story’s culture are silly, like the daily rituals and faux-science pushed by the government.

Here in 2023 I couldn’t help but think in terms of The Matrix and how the fictional government may be misleading the general public about Earth’s true circumstances and getting enforced, free labor out of the peasants while a privileged elite live in spacious comfort and elegance.

At any rate, it should be clear how thought-provoking this piece is. A few years after this aired, in 1974, a radio play version of Home or Future Soap was broadcast. 

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