On Sept. 17, after 54 years of backstabbing, bitchery and tune-in-tomorrows, “As the World Turns” followed its sister soap “Guiding Light” into an ever-expanding universe of defunct daytime melodrama. In 1990 an average daily soap viewership of 6.5 million could choose among 12 network serials. Today, according to a recent report in Advertising Age, average viewership hovers well below 1.5 million, with six soaps left on the air. When production at the “As the World Turns” studio in Brooklyn halted in June, New York was left with only one soap — “One Life to Live,” on ABC — and hundreds of actors plotting their next real-life story lines.

“It’s the loss of a creative environment as much as a loss of paychecks,” said Trent Dawson, whose hapless, occasionally cross-dressing Henry Coleman gave “As the World Turns” some comic relief and the actor a schedule that allowed him to moonlight at the Baltimore Centerstage theater. Mr. Dawson, 39, is currently appearing in Vaclav Havel’s “Memorandum” at the Beckett Theater, Off Broadway.

Since 1949, when the DuMont network first broadcast the 15-minute daytime serial “A Woman to Remember” from the small basement studio of Wanamaker’s department store in Manhattan, generations of New York actors found in soaps a combination of training, money and camaraderie that isn’t likely to be replaced. In addition to dozens of regular cast members, “As the World Turns” hired as many as 50 extras and day players per week, said Christopher Goutman, the last executive producer of the show.

New York, he said, “will have a lot more actors waiting tables.”

In The Memorandum, billed as a look at "bureaucracy gone mad," the managing director of an organization discovers that all office communications are suddenly being written in "Ptydepe," a new and impossibly complicated language. He seeks to get a memo translated, taking him through a maddening riot of red tape. The play is said to be inspired by the absurdities of life in communist Eastern Europe.

The cast of The Memorandum includes TACT members Mark Alhadeff (The Cocktail Party, Incident at Vichy), Jeffrey C. Hawkins (Incident at Vichy, The Confidential Clerk), John Plumpis (The Lion King, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels), James Prendergast (Incident at Vichy, The Late Christopher Bean), Lynn Wright (The Elephant Man, As Bees in Honey Drown) and guest artists Nilanjana Bose (TACT debut, 2010 Juilliard graduate), Trent Dawson (TACT debut, "As the World Turns"), Joel Leffert (Freudian Slips) and Kate Levy (On Golden Pond, Well).

Read the entire article at Playbill

More information about this and what else Trent has been involved with can be found at trentdawson.com