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‘Anton’ passes ultimate test: It works

By Candace Chaney CONTRIBUTING THEATER CRITIC

Theater about theater — isn’t that a little precious?

So said a character during Anton in Show Business, AGL’s final production of its 23rd season. She went on to dissect the production and its deeper aims with enviable aplomb and intelligence, though colored by an eagerness for equal parts skepticism and enthusiasm.

After that discourse, questions about theater –—the presence or lack of theater’s relevance, purpose, value and artistic and financial viability — all but hung from the black box theater’s rafters as the show went on.

Yes, Anton in Show Business is a play about a play. Could that be seen as obviously contrived? The most overused trick in the book? A precious gimmick? It could, but in this case, it’s not. OK, maybe a little. But it passes perhaps the only test any art needs to: It works.

Anton in Show Business centers on the plight a regional production company’s attempt to mount Anton Chekhov’s The Three Sisters. The fictional production is plagued from the beginning with a host of industry stereotypes and unfortunate truths about “the business.” From lack of funding to diva derailments, the show suffers one artistic and financial blow after another, becoming a metaphor for the state of American theater.

The show, written by Jane Martin, debuted to wide critical acclaim in 2000 at the Humana Festival of Plays in Louisville, and it is easy to see why. The material is smart and crisp, successfully weaving a ripe debate about theater’s ongoing, multiple existential crises into a well-crafted, well-paced evening of entertainment. Its eagerness to poke fun at its own profession (even taking a swipe at us poor, misunderstood critics) prevents it from becoming an exercise in self-indulgence, unlike its fictional counterpart.

A trademark of this production is that the performances seem behemothly overdrawn at times. It is difficult to have empathy for individual characters or to feel invested in their relationship with one another. On the other hand, that may just be the point. The play is, self-admittedly so, more interpretation than story. Each “sister” represents a different “character” from the theater industry –the vacuous ego-tripping TV star, the non-salaried queen of off-off-Broadway, the doe-eyed country bumpkin awash in naiveté. As one character eloquently points out, The Three Sisters is largely about vulgarity — the vulgarity of the rich toward the poor, the poor toward beauty, and so on. Likewise, there is a blatant vulgarity about these characters that serve the play’s deeper metaphor.