December 2015: Anton in Show Business

Is it a comedy about a tragedy? A tragedy about a comedy? A sophisticated backstage satirical farce about the madness of 21st century American theatre, with lots of costume changes? 

 It’s Anton in Show Business, performed at Gist Hall Theatre on Friday and Saturday December 4 and 5, Thurs. through Sat. Dec. 10-12 at 7:30 p.m., with a Sunday Dec. 13 matinee at 2 p.m. Tickets are $10 general/$8 students and seniors, with a limited number of free tickets for HSU students at each performance, from the HSU Ticket Office (826-3928) or at the door. Produced by HSU Department of Theatre, Film & Dance.

Media: Eureka Times-Standard Urge, Mad River Union, North Coast Journal, Humboldt State Now

   Katie Taylor as Holly, Samantha Kolby as Casey.  Not pictured: Erin Henry as
     Lisabette.

Three actresses are performing a play about three actresses navigating through the gentle nightmare of preparing a low budget production of Anton Chekhov’s The Three Sisters in Texas.

 Passionate but plain Casey (played by Samantha Kolby), innocent young Lisabette (Erin Henry) and Holly from Hollywood (Katie Taylor) must deal with the conflicting agendas of producers, directors, critic, underwriter--and each other.

    Michelle Purnell in one of her roles, as stage manager T-Anne

 An all-female cast plays characters of both genders.

                      Fledgling drama critic Joby (Makenna Baker) interacts
                      with actors Holly (Katie Taylor) and Casey (Samantha Kolby)
                      as stage manager T-Anne (Michelle Purnell) looks on.

Since this is a play about a play, the actors also banter with a critic in the audience.

   Costume Designer Lynnie Horrigan suits up actor Camille Borrowdale

“We also have a ‘glam squad’ of five additional females who handle the wardrobe, scenic, makeup and all the changes that happen during the show, most of them in full view of the audience,” said director Rae Robison. “If you’ve ever been to a live show and wondered ‘how did they do that?’ you may have your questions answered as we show you some of our methods.”

“Even with all these weighty topics, it’s still at heart a funny, funny show,” Robison said.  “Audiences will definitely see something that they’ve never seen before in Humboldt, or maybe even anywhere else.”

Anton in Show Business: Cast & Production

Cast
Casey: Samantha Kolby
Lisabette: Erin Henry
Holly: Katie Taylor
Joby: Makenna Baker
T-Anne, Andwyneth, Don Blount, Airport Announcer: Michelle Purnell
Kate, Ben, Jackey: Stephanie Lemon
 Ralph, Joe Bob, Wikewitch: Camille Borrowdale
Understudy: Constance Hill
Understudy: Sammi Stowe


Production
Director: Rae Robison
Scenic Designer: Calder Johnson
Costume Designer: Lynnie Horrigan
Lighting Designer: Jack Anderson
Sound Designer: Cory Stewart
Production Manager: Derek Lane
Stage Manager: Margaret Champoux
Assistant Director: Teresa Rosata
Assistant Stage Manager: Roman Sanchez

Anton in Show Business: The Director

Director Rae Robison talks about the play, the HSU production and what audiences can expect to see.

"I've loved this script by Jane Martin (who may or may not be Jon Jory) since I designed the show back in 2004 or so. At the time, I was just beginning to think about the implications of females in this industry, their power position or lack thereof and my place as an actor, designer and director involved in theatre. The past few years have seen a resurgence in the issue of the disparity between what female actors earn versus their male counterparts, why there are so few female directors and why there are so few female playwrights produced today.”

 Robison referenced recent comments by Jennifer Lawrence and Emma Watson (among other women quoted in a Guardian article) on sexism in motion pictures. “It is devastating that a play commenting on these issues that was written in 2001 is so relevant today. That's why we're doing it."

"Early in the play Kate, one of the characters, explains why the actors are playing both genders in this production. Holly, our television diva, gives the "dirt" on the beauty price of women in Hollywood. Late in the play, the idea of theatre as a self-reverential experience is discussed. I think there's a lot of thought provoking, hopefully discussion- inducing topics that Jane Martin illustrates in Anton in Show Business. "What is the role of theatre today?" This show may start the discussion."

  “I feel fortunate to have this show in our season and to work with seven wonderful undergraduate actresses, a talented production team and terrific designers including scenic designer Calder Johnson and costume designer Lynnie Horrigan, who were both former students of mine and now working professionals.

I've had a few years to think about how I wanted to stage this and had some definite visual ideas rattling around, but the team helped develop my earliest thoughts into an unusual visual aesthetic that should give audience members a unique view into the machinery of our theatre world. I've definitely not seen anything staged this way and am excited to see how it plays.

 We have a core group of seven female actors who play over a dozen characters, both male and female. We also have a "glam squad" of five additional females who handle the wardrobe, scenic, makeup and all the changes that happen during the show - most of them in full view of the audience. If you've ever been to a live show and wondered "how did they do that?" you may have your questions answered as we show you some of our methods. This show is a bit like a magician letting you see what's in his or her pockets - we're letting you see what we do behind the curtain.

 Even with all these weighty topics, it's still at the heart a funny, funny show. Audiences will definitely see something that they've never seen before in Humboldt or maybe even anywhere else."

Anton in Show Business: The Three Sisters

Sisters Vanessa and Lynn Redgrave with their niece Jemma
Redgrave in a 1991 production of The Three Sisters

Anton in Show Business is a play about a play about three actresses cast in a provincial production of The Three Sisters by Russian playwright Anton Chekhov.

His plays, first produced in the late 19th and early 20th century, soon revolutionized not only Russian drama but theatre in England (where Bernard Shaw was one of the first to praise him), western Europe, America and now the world.

There are many references to The Three Sisters in Anton... and views on how Chekhov is performed today.  The following elements of Chekhov’s play suggests some themes of idealism, disappointment and courage that are echoed to some extent in Anton in Show Business.

By 1900, playwright Anton Chekhov had two hits—The Seagull and Uncle Vanya—produced by the Moscow Art Theatre, directed by Konstantin Stanislavsky. The theatre wanted a new Chekhov play for their next season, and Chekhov obliged with The Three Sisters, the first play he wrote expressly for the Moscow Art Theatre.

 Chekhov did something different in this play—he showed how his main characters changed over time, especially as their lives were shaped by their surroundings and other characters.

 The three sisters—Olga, Masha and Irina—are the young adult daughters of a recently deceased army general. They remember their earlier years in the great city of Moscow as glittering and free, but they are now living in a provincial town where their father had been posted. Their dreams of getting back to Moscow are the focus of their yearnings for a better, larger life.

 The play begins with their restlessness and idealistic hopes, and that of their younger brother Andrei. But the rest of the play shows an encroaching banality taking over their lives, as they get older and the dreams fade from possibility.

 Irina, the youngest sister, finally seeks to break away from an increasingly stifled life, although at the cost of an unsatisfying marriage. But even that liberation is thwarted.  Without great or terrible events, their lives have escaped them.

 Throughout the play, several characters—but especially the three sisters—exhibit vitality and courage even as their lives diminish without their dreams fulfilled. In some ways the sisters don't fully understand the forces that have shaped their lives.

The play ends with music and resolution from the three sisters: "We must go on." "There is work to be done...I shall devote my whole life where it's needed." "Listen to the music...Oh, my dear sisters, life is not over for us yet.  Let us live."

Within a realistic framework, The Three Sisters expresses aspects of tragedy and of comedy, even clownish physical comedy.  (But then, so do Shakespeare's tragedies.)  Its ultimate nature is elusive.  Productions often treat it as a kind of tragedy, and the final affirmations as ironic.  Chekhov himself insisted it's a comedy.

Anton in Show Business is the second recently produced play locally to refer extensively to Chekhov and themes of his plays, the other being Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike by Christopher Durang, at Redwood Curtain last year.  But there hasn't been a local production of an actual Chekhov play in several decades. The Oregon Shakespeare Festival however has produced several.

Anton in Show Business: Meta Theatre

 “Meta Theatre” (or "metatheatre") is a fashionable concept without a precise definition. It’s been used for instance to describe plays in which comedy and tragedy occur in close relationship. But the Greek prefix “meta” suggests a second level above, the clearest theatrical example being the play within a play.

 Anton in Show Business is the second HSU production in a row this year to feature a prominent play within a play. Moreover, both Kiss Me, Kate and Anton in Show Business are about theatrical productions in process, exposing backstage activity as part of the onstage action.

 In Kiss Me Kate, the play within the play (Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew inside an ongoing production of that play) is designed to comically reveal the symmetry in relationships between the actors and their characters. But Anton reveals and satirizes the theatrical world in which the play within the play takes place.

 A play that comments on itself is more clearly “meta-theatrical.” Satire and parody can occur without that additional level of distance and complication, when the object of satire is business culture (How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying) or war and other human follies (Aristophanes, Stanley Kubrick) as well as particular institutions (as in Paddy Chayefsky’s films Hospital and Network.)

But when the target of satire is theatrical convention or institutions including theatre, that additional level of distance and complication in meta theatre may appear. In entertainment terms, it can be effective through the boldness and legitimacy of its critique, the language or action by which the critique is made, or in critiquing itself by answering a question that might occur to audience members at the time it occurs to them, as happens a few times in Anton (after the caricature of an activist black director, for instance.)

 Of Anton in Show Business, New York Times critic Bruce Weber observed: “The barbs are insider-specific and most are affectionately applied, and in the end the message is clear. The theatrical enterprise has been so fouled by money problems, so twisted by a culture of celebrity, so swaddled in intellectual pretension, that the simple desire to put on a show, to tell a story onstage, has been hopelessly -- almost hopelessly -- buried. What has risen in its place is a hermetic theater world that talks to itself and whose citizens are defensive and embarrassed about the fundamental joy that drew them to the stage in the first place.”

 That is, in part, to theatre without the meta.

Anton in Show Business: Why are women playing men?

 Why does this play stipulate that women perform all the parts, including the male characters?

 Joby, the critic in the play, asks the same question. Kate, the producer, answers: “Eighty percent of the roles in the American theatre are played by men, and 90% of the directors are men. The point of having a male director played by a woman is to redress the former and satirize the latter. How’s that?”

 These figures appear to be taken from the research of Karen Bovard, author of Voice, Viewwpoint, and the Adolescent Actor: a feminist ethic of directing. She adds that men’s roles outnumber women’s by 7 to 1 “in the dramatic canon.”

 Another estimate comes from dramatist and essayist Lauren Gunderson, who writes “It appears that in many major theaters across the country, men’s roles outnumber women’s by half. One out of every three roles go to women. (An informal survey of 10 theatrical seasons from across the country that I did put women in only 35% of the total roles.)”

playwright Marsha Norman

 But that 20% figure for the percentage of women’s roles is echoed in other aspects of theatre and beyond. Playwright Marsha Norman comments on this in the latest issue of The Dramatist, the magazine of the Dramatists Guild. An ongoing Guild study using three years of data from American regional theatre productions found that 22% of the plays performed were written by women.

Norman notes that in a survey of itself by National Public Radio, the percentage of women interviewed, doing the interview, or as the subject of the story was also about 20%. In art museums, 20% of the art displayed was by women, and “before the advent of blind auditions, 20% of the players [in orchestras] were women.”

 The Dramatists Guild count, Norman wrote, is “not to establish quotas, not to shame and blame those people who continue to produce only the plays of men, but to assure that the voice of women will be heard in this land.”

 Ironically perhaps, the author of Anton In Show Business—“Jane Martin”-- may not be one of them. For Jane Martin may not be a woman playwright at all.

Anton in Show Business: Who is Jane Martin?

 Nominally (that is, by name), Jane Martin is an American playwright of more than a dozen full-length plays, plus numerous shorter plays since 1982. Four of these plays have been honored by the American Theatre Critics Association (including Anton in Show Business), and one (Keely and Du) was a Pulitzer Prize finalist.

 But there are no photos of Jane Martin, no interviews, no public appearances. Jane Martin has never openly attended a rehearsal or a premiere of any of her plays. Her identity has never been revealed, even to actors in her plays. Even the “her” designation is open to question.

 The person who speaks for Martin is the director of all but one of the first productions of Martin’s plays (as well as the producer of most): Jon Jory. Jory was the legendary head of the Actors Theatre of Louisville since 1969, and began the Humana Festival of New American Plays there in 1976. It became the most powerful venue for productions of new plays in America.

 All of Jane Martin’s produced plays between 1982 and 2000 (including 10 full lengths and 6 one-acts) were first staged at the Humana Festival by Jory. In that period, Humana produced Martin more often than any other playwright.

 It was long suspected that Jory is Martin, but the premiere of Anton in Show Business at the Humana Festival in 2000—the year that Jory left Louisville for a teaching position at the University of Washington in Seattle—seemed to settle it for most observers.

 “Mr. Jory is widely thought to be Jane Martin,” wrote New York Times critic Bruce Weber in his review of that year’s festival, “or at least the chairman of a Jane Martin committee.”

 In the Winter 2014 issue of the Journal of American Drama and Theatre. Jeffrey Ullom analyzed the evidence in detail, in his article “The Playwright as Publicity: Reexamining Jane Martin and the Legacy of the Humana Festival.”

 There have been other names offered as the playwright who uses Jane Martin as a pseudonym. Ullom looks at two: playwright Beth Henley and former literary manager of the Actors Theatre Michael Bigelow Dixon. Though there are tantalizing threads of evidence for each, Ullom soon settles on Jory. (He accepts the possibility of Jory’s collaborations with others, particularly his wife, Marcia Dixcy Jory, also a playwright.)

 He notes that Jory was already a playwright, but that he stopped writing for production at about the same time as Martin began. Jory had used a pseudonym before, writing as a drama critic while acting in theatre in college, to the point of reviewing his own performances. A Louisville newspaper reporter even found that Jory’s freelance income greatly increased in the years that Martin was being widely produced, though his freelance activity didn’t.

 But among the strongest indications was this play, Anton in Show Business. In general it demonstrates a wide knowledge of American theatre that Jory possesses. A number of specific critiques made by characters in the play have also been made by Jory.

 For example, Holly describes directors such as the one she just fired: “They have these pushy little egos but hardly any usable information, which makes them very sad and time-consuming.”

 Jory, no stranger to firing directors, complained that theatre directors were inadequately prepared, and wrote an article for American Theatre magazine titled “Why Directors Can’t Direct.”

 Ullom notes that the conviction that Jory is “Martin” has strengthened since 2000, as “the location of Martin’s debuts have followed Jory around the country.”

 Ullom finds this masquerade troubling in a number of ways. As the title of his article indicates, the “mystery” of Jane Martin has been a dependable boost to publicity of Martin’s plays, suggesting more cynicism than irony.

 He also noted Jory’s role in selecting Martin’s plays out of the many vying for production in the Humana Festival, arguably the most important showcase for new plays in America. “With Jory selecting himself under the guise of a Southern female playwright, that objectivity comes into question.”

 This pseudonym also may have misrepresented the number of women playwrights the Humana Festival was actually producing, Ullom suggests. Other questions arise if a male playwright is representing himself as a female playwright, particularly as author of a play that criticizes the disproportionately low number of women actors, directors and by implication, playwrights in American theatre.

“If Jory is Jane Martin, how does this fact affect Actors Theatre of Louisville’s reputation as a home for women playwrights?” Ullom writes. “On numerous occasions, Actors Theatre employees have stressed the institution’s dedication to supporting female playwrights, adding to the theatre’s legacy. However, with the assumption that Jory is Martin, this achievement becomes tainted. For Jory and his company to have celebrated Jane Martin’s inclusion in any list of female writers is disingenuous at best and a lie at its worst.”