UWM’s ‘Anton in Show Business’

A sign posted onstage at the UW-Milwaukee theater department’s production of Anton in Show Business read, “Do something about it or get the fuck out!” Jane Martin’s snappy comedy about three actresses doing a production of Chekhov’s Three Sisters represents theater taking stock of itself and this invective encapsulates the extreme perseverance necessary in dog-eat-dog circumstances.  

The show is full of theater business archetypes. Kelly Layde as a naïve Southern schoolteacher, Rachel Pagel as the “Queen of Off-Off-Broadway” and Solana Ramirez-Garcia as a TV star trying to break into film by gentrifying her résumé, delivered strong performances as the three actresses/sisters. We also find a vindictive Russian director (brilliant comedian Grace Yeager) and a critic (Ashley Daoust) who sits in the audience and breaks into the action with questions and comments, adding yet another level to the play’s metatheatrical structure.

Written to be performed by an all-female cast—an open-handed slap to dismal gender disparities in theater—UWM obeyed this convention in most cases. Anna Bisch (as country singer Ben) best realized the casting choice with believable, earnest mannerisms. Britney Ison, as a despicable tobacco company businessman trying to buy off the contemptuous public through arts funding, also shines.

Non-realist in form and full of laughs, Anton is nonetheless very serious in its treatment of the realities of the industry. We may be tempted to view the struggling American theater—and particularly self-reflective works such as this—as Joby does: as “beating a dead horse from the inside.” And yet, for all its realistic disappointments, the ending is hopeful. Layde, as the innocent Lisabette, wraps up the show with the musing that involvement in theater is like buying a lottery ticket; the odds of lasting value may be slim, but sometimes, just sometimes, the ancient Greek aspiration to communion and catharsis is achieved.

The production ran Oct. 8-12 at UWM’s Mainstage Thea