Dude looks like a lady: Kim Pompo and Marissa Roberts in Le Moyne College’s Anton in Show Business.
While
it helps to know a little bit about Chekhov (two pages from Cliff’s
Notes will suffice), the name you need to know more about is mysterious
playwright Jane Martin. Several of Martin’s plays have been performed
locally; the old Contemporary Theater of Syracuse successfully produced
her Talking With. . . and Keely and Du. And she’s been nominated for
Pulitzer Prizes. Yet no one knows who or what she is.
Speculation
has usually centered on Jon Jory, a longtime honcho of Actors Theatre
of Louisville, home of the Humana Festival of New Plays, where Martin’s
works always premiere. Jory always denies authorship, and, who knows,
“Martin” may be any of a sequence of people or even a committee. No
matter. Whoever wrote Anton in Show Business has spent a lot of time
with show people, and is less than entranced with what he/she sees of
vanity and stupidity. Like Pirandello, however, the playwright retains
a sense of awe for what drama can build from base materials.
Action
begins with an Our Town-like narrator, T-Anne (Genairse Giles), who
leads us to the three principals. Red-haired Lisabette (Alecia
Wortman), a bubbly third-grade teacher and a veteran of community
theater, is bursting with enthusiasm for her first big role, Irina, the
youngest and most naive of Chekhov’s sisters. Worldly brunette Casey
(Rhawnie Reil) bills herself as the “queen of off-off-Broadway,” who’s
been in dozens of shows and never earned a cent. At 37 she still owes
$40,000 in college loans. She will play Olga, the oldest and most
disappointed of Chekhov’s sisters.
Then
there’s that monster of self-absorption, blonde Holly (Marissa
Roberts), a soap opera star looking for acting credits by doing
classical theater, but only as a means for advancing her career to the
big screen. She will be the tragically vain Masha.
As
Anton in Show Business was written for a professional company,
apparently one in which performers know each other offstage, the
principal roles put great demands on student performers. Although
Rhawnie Reil is visibly 16 or 17 years younger than the mordant Casey,
her deadpan, hard-bitten style evokes the right cynical tone and draws
sparks with some of the best lines in the show. Fewer comic lines are
allowed to Lisabette, often at her own expense, but Alecia Wortman
handles these with unfailing good timing. If she seems better than the
material, that’s a tip-off for a plot turn coming at the end of the
second act.
Trickiest to cast is the
smashing blonde Holly, who also knows how to deliver gag lines. Marissa
Roberts is only a sophomore, perhaps only 19 or 20 years old, but she’s
also a champion figure skater who won a gold medal at the 2002 Winter
Empire State Games. When Roberts is called upon to perform
calisthenics, incidentally displaying her shapely gams, she still
delivers her lines without pausing to take a breath. She can be just as
cynical as Casey: “After directors are fired they find careers on
cruise ships, where they don’t cause any harm.” Beautiful, athletic
blondes are often modest, generous people, as Roberts no doubt is
offstage, but this is acting, and her Holly rides a powerful ego.
All
the supporting roles were written to be played by women, sometimes with
players taking more than one part. The effect is often farcical. The
quite feminine Fiona Barbour dons a mustache to play the condescending
Englishman Ralph and then becomes a different kind of American gent,
Don Blunt, the arrogant board president. Kim Pompo runs a wider gamut
by playing three guys, including a flaming gay costumer and a
star-struck country singer ready to leave his wife for Holly. Caitlin
Keyes shouts from the balcony as Jory, at first an annoying one-woman
Greek chorus speaking for the audience and then as an even more
annoying critic. Some of these characters Martin/Jory may have drawn
from life, such as Katie Edwards’ lesbian producer so easily given to
hysteria.
One guy got into the cast. Alex
Gherardi’s Wikewitch is an explosive Russian director who pompously
claims to know Chekhov better than Yankees but uselessly advises actors
to leave their brains outside when performing.
Once
again director Anjalee Nadkarni has led us to the fresh and new. Her
team includes the always excellent lighting and scenic designs of Karel
Blakeley, here featuring an askew proscenium encasing a raked stage
leading to a rag and bone shop of discarded props. Melissa Scobell’s
costumes allow women to be women and, when called for, to be men, too. q
This production runs through Saturday, Feb. 23. See Times Table for information.
