Jory Duty
Is the never-seen playwright Jane Martin an alias for Jon Jory? Who cares: Anton in Show Business is still a laugh riot
By James MacKillop

The playwright implied in the title of Jane Martin’s backstage satire Anton in Show Business is, of course, the Russian master Anton Chekhov, author of The Three Sisters. A few minutes into the action, however, we can see that this comedy draws more from the Italian Luigi Pirandello crossed with the British Alan Ayckbourn but in an American setting. Le Moyne College’s Boot and Buskin Theater Group is currently mounting this as its annual winter-semester production at the Coyne Center for the Performing Arts.

In this play three actresses and a full production company, including director, costumer and hangers-on, are preparing a version of Chekhov’s The Three Sisters for San Antonio. There are no gags, blessedly, directed at Texas rubes too dim for Chekhov’s subtleties. Instead, comical darts are thrown at everyone in sight, from divas to critics.

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.