‘Queen of the Soaps’ is a Soap Within a Soap

Some of the characters in the soap “Light of Love” have been at it for so long that their TV reality has become bizarrely entangled with their personal reality. Gloria Loring’s diva soap opera star Monica McKay has been getting married and crying for 20 years and now she can’t decide whether she’s in love with the show’s writer or her leading man. She wants out.

Welcome to the send-up “Queen of the Soaps” by Nan and Ivan Lyons at International City Theatre in Long Beach.

Director Shashin Desai and set designer Don Gruber have created the feeling of a TV studio soundstage right down to the director’s glassed-in booth, rolling sets, overhead monitors, cameras, dressing rooms and, the coup de grace , a towering catwalk that spans the entire stage.

The actors take themselves just seriously enough (most pointedly Greg Michaels’ leading man and Donald Phelps’ harried director) to capture the requisite satire. The ingenuously chipper Terence Goodman manages to turn the play’s token gay character into a lovable cast cut-up.

But there’s a curious lack of momentum and a gnawing redundancy in this life-imitating-art farce. The creators have done their homework almost too well. The sensation is like watching a crew shoot a real TV show--you are dazed and numbed by the cumulative blur of snips and fragments.

At Long Beach City College (at Harvey Way and Clark Avenue), Fridays and Saturdays, 8 p.m., Sundays, 2 and 7:30 p.m., through Nov. 18. (213) 420-4128.