I first came across the script of Anton in Show Business in 2001, when a critic from a Richmond, VA-based weekly called Style Weekly brought it to me after seeing it at the Humana Festival at Actors Theatre of Louisville.  He said it was the funniest play he had ever seen and upon reading the script, I tended to agree with him.  However, I was concerned that the nature of the play (three actresses cast in an ill-fated production of The Three Sisters of all things) would not be accessible to a broader audience.  My theatre ended up passing on the script and it was produced by another theatre in town and it became a huge hit!  The lesson, once again, is that no one ever knows what audiences will connect with and anyone who says they do is a liar or a fool!  So here we are, six years later, and I have an opportunity to produce Anton in Show Business here in the Bluegrass. 

 

First off, the background:

 

Who is/was Anton Chekhov?  ANTON CHEKHOV was born in the old Black Sea port of Taganrog on January 17, 1860. His grandfather had been a serf; his father married a merchant's daughter and settled in Taganrog, where, during Anton's boyhood, he carried on a small and unsuccessful trade in provisions. The young Chekhov was soon impressed into the services of the large, poverty-stricken family, and he spoke regretfully in after years of his hard-worked childhood. But he was obedient and good-natured, and worked cheerfully in his father's shop, closely observing the idlers that assembled there, and gathering the drollest stories, which he would afterward whisper in class to his laughing schoolfellows. Many were the punishments which he incurred by this habit, which was incorrigible.

His grandfather had now become manager of an estate near Taganrog, in the wild steppe country of the Don Cossacks, and here the boy spent his summers, fishing in the river, and roving about the countryside as brown as a gypsy, sowing the seeds of that love for nature which he retained all his life. His evenings he liked best to spend in the kitchen of the master's house among the work people and peasants who gathered there, taking part in their games, and setting them all laughing by his witty and telling observations.

When Chekhov was about fourteen, his father moved the family to Moscow, leaving Anton in Taganrog, and now, relieved of work in the shop, his progress at school became remarkable. At seventeen he wrote a long tragedy, which was afterward destroyed, and he already showed flashes of the wit that was soon to blaze into genius.

He graduated from the high school at Taganrog with every honour, entered the Universityof Moscow as a student of medicine, and threw himself headlong into a double life of student and author, in the attempt to help his strugging family.

His first story appeared in a Moscow paper in 1880, and after some difficulty he secured a position connected with several of the smaller periodicals, for which, during his student years, he poured forth a succession of short stories and sketches of Russian life with incredible rapidity. He wrote, he tells us, during every spare minute, in crowded rooms where there was "no light and less air," and never spent more than a day on any one story. He also wrote at this time a very stirring blood-and-thunder play which was suppressed by the censor, and the fate of which is not known.

His audience demanded laughter above all things, and, with his deep sense of the ridiculous, Chekhov asked nothing better. His stories, though often based on themes profoundly tragic, are penetrated by the light and subtle satire that has won him his reputation as a great humourist. But though there was always a smile on his lips, it was a tender one, and his sympathy with suffering often brought his laughter near to tears.

This delicate and original genius was at first subjected to harsh criticism, which Chekhov felt keenly, and Trigorin's description in The Sea-Gull of the trials of a young author is a cry from Chekhov's own soul. A passionate enemy of all lies and oppression, he already foreshadows in these early writings the protest against conventions and rules, which he afterward put into Treplieff's reply to Sorin in The Sea-Gull: "Let us have new forms, or else nothing at all."

In 1884 he took his degree as doctor of medicine, and decided to practice, although his writing had by now taken on a professional character. He always gave his calling a high place, and the doctors in his works are drawn with affection and understanding. If any one spoke slightly of doctors in his presence, he would exclaim: "Stop! You don't know what country doctors do for the people!"

Chekhov fully realized later the influence which his profession had exercised on his literary work, and sometimes regretted the too vivid insight it gave him, but, on the other hand, he was able to write: "Only a doctor can know what value my knowledge of science has been to me," and "It seems to me that as a doctor I have described the sicknesses of the soul correctly." For instance, Trigorin's analysis in The Sea-Gull of the state of mind of an author has well been called "artistic diagnosis."

The young doctor-writer is described at this time as modest and grave, with flashes of brilliant gaiety. A son of the people, there was in his face an expression that recalled the simple-hearted village lad; his eyes were blue, his glance full of intelligence and kindness, and his manners unaffected and simple. He was an untiring worker, and between his patients and his desk he led a life of ceaseless activity. His restless mind was dominated by a passion of energy and he thought continually and vividly. Often, while jesting and talking, he would seem suddenly to plunge into himself, and his look would grow fixed and deep, as if he were contemplating something important and strange. Then he would ask some unexpected question, which showed how far his mind had roamed.

Success was now rapidly overtaking the young author; his first collection of stories appeared in 1887, another one in the same year had immediate success, and both went through many editions; but, at the same time, the shadows that darkened his later works began to creep over his light-hearted humour.

His impressionable mind began to take on the grey tinge of his time, but much of his sadness may also be attributed to his ever-increasing ill health.

Weary and with an obstinate cough, he went south in 1888, took a little cottage on the banks of a little river "abounding in fish and crabs," and surrendered himself to his touching love for nature, happy in his passion for fishing, in the quiet of the country, and in the music and gaiety of the peasants. "One would gladly sell one's soul," he writes, "for the pleasure of seeing the warm evening sky, and the streams and pools reflecting the darkly mournful sunset." He described visits to his country neighbors and long drives in gay company, during which, he says, "we ate every half hour, and laughed to the verge of colic."

His health, however, did not improve. In 1889 he began to have attacks of heart trouble, and the sensitive artist's nature appears in a remark which he made after one of them. "I walked quickly across the terrace on which the guests were assembled," he said, "with one idea in my mind, how awkward it would be to fall down and die in the presence of strangers."

It was during this transition period of his life, when his youthful spirits were failing him, that the stage, for which he had always felt a fascination, tempted him to write Ivanoff, and also a dramatic sketch in one act entitled The Swan Song, though he often declared that he had no ambition to become a dramatist. "The Novel," he wrote, "is a lawful wife, but the Stage is a noisy, flashy, and insolent mistress." He has put his opinion of the stage of his day in the mouth of Treplieff, in The Sea-Gull, and he often refers to it in his letters as "an evil disease of the towns" and "the gallows on which dramatists are hanged."

He wrote Ivanoff at white-heat in two and a half weeks, as a protest against a play he had seen at one of the Moscow theatres. Ivanoff (from Ivan, the commonest of Russian names) was by no means meant to be a hero, but a most ordinary, weak man oppressed by the "immortal commonplaces of life," with his heart and soul aching in the grip of circumstances, one of the many "useless people" of Russia for whose sorrow Chekhov felt such overwhelming pity. He saw nothing in their lives that could not be explained and pardoned, and he returns to his ill-fated, "useless people" again and again, not to preach any doctrine of pessimism, but simply because he thought that the world was the better for a certain fragile beauty of their natures and their touching faith in the ultimate salvation of humanity.

Both the writing and staging of Ivanoff gave Chekhov great difficulty. The characters all being of almost equal importance, he found it hard to get enough good actors to take the parts, but it finally appeared in Moscow in 1889, a decided failure! The author had touched sharply several sensitive spots of Russian life, and the play was also marred by faults of inexperience, which, however, he later corrected. The critics were divided in condemning a certain novelty in it and in praising its freshness and originality. The character of Ivanoff was not understood, and the weakness of the man blinded many to the lifelike portrait. Chekhov himself was far from pleased with what he called his "literary abortion," and rewrote it before it was produced again in St. Petersburg. Here it was received with the wildest applause, and the morning after its performance the papers burst into unanimous praise. The author was enthusiastically fêted, but the burden of his growing fame was beginning to be very irksome to him, and he wrote wearily at this time that he longed to be in the country, fishing in the lake, or lying in the hay.

His next play to appear was a farce entitled The Boor, which he wrote in a single evening and which had a great success. This was followed by The Demon, a failure, rewritten ten years later as Uncle Vanya.

All Russia now combined in urging Chekhov to write some important work, and this, too, was the writer's dream; but his only long story is "The Steppe," which is, after all, but a series of sketches, exquisitely drawn, and strung together on the slenderest connecting thread. Chekhov's delicate and elusive descriptive power did not lend itself to painting on a large canvas, and his strange little tragi-comedies of Russian life, his "Tedious Tales," as he called them, were always to remain his masterpieces.

In 1890 Chekhov made a journey to the islandof Saghalien, after which his health definitely failed, and the consumption, with which he had long been threatened, finally declared itself. His illness exiled him to the Crimea, and he spent his last ten years there, making frequent trips to Moscowto superintend the production of his four important plays, written during this period of his life.

The Sea-Gull appeared in 1896, and, after a failure in St. Petersburg, won instant success as soon as it was given on the stage of the Moscow Art Theatre. In Trigorin the author gives us one of the rare glimpses of his own mind, for Chekhov seldom put his own personality into the pictures of the life in which he took such immense interest.

In The Sea-Gull we see clearly the increase of Chekhov's power of analysis, which is remarkable in his next play, The Three Sisters, gloomiest of all his dramas.

The Three Sisters, produced in 1901, depends, even more than most of Chekhov's plays, on its interpretation, and it is almost essential to its appreciation that it should be seen rather than read. The atmosphere of gloom with which it is pervaded is a thousand times more intense when it comes to us across the foot-lights. In it Chekhov probes the depths of human life with so sure a touch, and lights them with an insight so piercing, that the play made a deep impression when it appeared. This was also partly owing to the masterly way in which it was acted at the Moscow Art Theatre. The theme is, as usual, the greyness of provincial life, and the night is lit for his little group of characters by a flash of passion so intense that the darkness which succeeds it seems well nigh intolerable.

Uncle Vanya followed The Three Sisters, and the poignant truth of the picture, together with the tender beauty of the last scene, touched his audience profoundly, both on the stage and when the play was afterward published.

The Cherry Orchard appeared in 1904 and was Chekhov's last play. At its production, just before his death, the author was fêted as one of Russia's greatest dramatists. Here it is not only country life that Chekhov shows us, but Russian life and character in general, in which the old order is giving place to the new, and we see the practical, modern spirit invading the vague, aimless existence so dear to the owners of the cherry orchard. A new epoch is beginning, and at its dawn the singer of old, dim Russiawas silenced.

In the year that saw the production of The Cherry Orchard, Chekhov, the favourite of the Russian people, whom Tolstoi declared to be comparable as a writer of stories only to Maupassant, died suddenly in a little village of the Black Forest, whither he had gone a few weeks before in the hope of recovering his lost health.

Chekhov, with an art peculiar to himself, in scattered scenes, in haphazard glimpses into the lives of his characters, in seemingly trivial conversations, has succeeded in so concentrating the atmosphere of the Russia of his day that we feel it in every line we read, oppressive as the mists that hang over a lake at dawn, and, like those mists, made visible to us by the light of an approaching day.

(Thanks theatrehistory.com)

Obviously if Anton in Show Business is about an ill-fated production of The Three Sisters, it would behoove us to know more about said play:

A year after the death of their father, an army officer, the Moscow-bred sisters Prosorov--Olga, Masha and Irina--are finding life drab and increasingly hopeless in a Russian provincial town. Only the proximity of a nearby artillery post and the company of its officers make their existence bearable.

Olga, the eldest, twenty-eight, is a teacher at the high school; she finds her work hateful, and herself already aging and tired, her dream of a happy marriage fading; she is sustained solely by the hope of selling the house and returning to Moscow. Masha, little more than twenty, is married to Kuligan, a teacher of far more years who has not lived up to the stature her school-girl mind had given him. For her there is no hope of Moscow; she only whistles softly to herself as her sisters make their plans. Irina, at twenty, dreams of finding happiness and love in Moscow. A brother, Andrey, a scholar, is in love with Natasha, twenty-eight, an overdressed villager who affects shyness and humility; his sisters find it hard to believe that he will marry her.

On Irina's birthday, the callers include Chebutikin, sixty, an army doctor who once loved the sisters' mother; Baron Tuzenbach, thirty, a lieutenant in love with Irina; brooding Captain Soleni, and a newcomer, Vershinin, forty-two, commander of the post. Vershinin has two daughters and a second wife who frequently threatens suicide to annoy him. A birthday cake is sent by Protopopov, head of the District Council. The sisters hope Protopopov will marry Natasha, but Andrey proposes to her and she accepts him.

With the marriage of Natasha and Andrey and the birth of a child, Bobby, the lot of the sisters becomes even more unhappy. Natasha, dropping her humility, dominates the sisters, her husband and the servants. She takes the room of Irina, who now works at the telegraph office, for the child; Irina must share Olga's room.

Vershinin, whose wife is endlessly quarrelsome, and the unhappy Masha, bored by her husband and his colleagues, are drawn together. One day Vershinin tells her of his love for her. She at first protests, then in resignation answers: "Go on, it's all the same to me." They are interrupted by Tuzenbach and Irina. The Baron has resigned his post to seek some satisfying work in civil life, and Irina, finding the telegraph office dull, is still obsessed with her hope of discovering happiness in Moscow. She is worried, too, because Andrey, frustrated in his plans for distinguished scholarship and now disappointed in Natasha, is gambling and losing heavily.

A gay evening with guests and entertainers has been planned, but Natasha compels Andrey to cancel the invitations on the pretext that little Bobby is ill. Soleni returns to confess his love to Irina. Rebuffed, he swears that he will kill any rival. Natasha receives a message from Protopopov inviting her to take a drive with him in his troika, and she laughingly accepts. "How funny these men are," she says.

At two o'clockin the morning, the household is awakened by a fire in the village. Refugees come to the Prosorov home for shelter. Natasha, abusing old Anfisa, the nurse, declares that she is now mistress of the household: Anfisa must go, and Olga and Irina must move downstairs. Old Chebutikin is drunk; by his fault a woman patient has died. Soleni enters, resentful at Irina's friendship with the Baron, and Vershinin brings a rumor that the battery is to be moved from the village.

Masha, quarreling with Kuligan, discloses that Andrey has mortgaged the house--in which the sisters share ownership--to pay his gambling debts, and that Natasha has the remainder of the money he has borrowed. Irina weeps--in disappointment at the failure of the brother from whom so much had been expected, and at her own frustration. She is now working in the town council offices, but she is no happier; she realizes at last that she will never return to Moscow. She cries: "I've grown thinner, plainer, older ... and time goes and it seems all the while as if I am going away from the real, the beautiful life, further and further away down some precipice." Olga urges that she compromise and accept the plain Baron.

Masha confesses that she is in love with Vershinin: "It is all awful.... How are we going to live through our lives, what is to become of us?... My dear ones, my sisters ... I've confessed, now I shall keep silence ... Like the lunatics in Gogol's story, I'm going to be silent ... silent ..."

Andrey, finding his sisters together, sulkily confesses to the mortgage of the house. He berates them for their disapproval of his wife, "a beautiful and honest creature, straight and honorable." He insists that they respect her, even in spite of her affair with Protopopov, and declares he is proud in his place as a mere member of the District Council. Then he weeps: "My dear, dear sisters, don't believe me, don't believe me..."

The night ends with Irina's decision revealed to Olga: "I esteem, I highly value the Baron, he's a splendid man! I'll marry him ... only let's go to Moscow! I implore you, let's go! There's nothing better than Moscowon earth! Let's go, Olga, let's go!"

Soon the rumor that the battery is to be removed is confirmed--it has been ordered to Poland. Farewells are being said at the Prosorov home. Irina is to be married tomorrow to the Baron; he has work and she is happy in having been accepted for a teacher's position. She tells Kuligin: "If I can't live in Moscow, then it must come to this.... It's all the will of God." Olga is now head-mistress of her school and is living there with old Anfisa. Vershinin kisses the sobbing Masha farewell, leaving her to the dull Kuligin.

Old Chebutikin comes to tell Irina that the Baron has been killed in the duel with Soleni, and the three sisters huddle together in grief. Says Masha: "They are leaving us ... we remain alone, to begin our life over again. We must live ... we must live ..."

Irina, her head on Olga's bosom, cries: "There will come a time when everybody will know why, for what purpose, there is all this suffering. But now we must live ... we must work, just work! Tomorrow, I'll go away alone, and I'll teach and give my whole life to those who, perhaps, need it."

Olga reflects, as the military bands are heard playing in farewell: "The bands are playing so gaily, so bravely, and one does so want to live!... Time will pass on, and we shall depart forever ... but our sufferings will turn into joy for those who shall live after us ... Oh, dear sister, our life is not yet at an end. Let us live ... It seems that in a little while we shall know why we are living, why we are suffering ..."

The music fades, the smiling Kuligin brings out Masha's coat, and Andrey wheels out Bobby in a perambulator. Old Chebutikin sings softly: "Tara... ra-boom-deay." Reading his paper, he reflects: "It's all the same! It's all the same!"

First produced in 1901 The Three Sisters remains one of the great plays of modern drama.  It is infrequently produced in the United States for another reason Anton in Show Business deals with:  the lack of resources for professional theatre and the ongoing struggles of serious theatre to succeed in our country of Reality TV. 

Some great lines from Anton in Show Business:

“The American theatre is in a shitload of trouble.  That’s why the stage is bare, and it’s a cast of six, all non-union.”

“80% of the roles in 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?”

“Isn’t this all just a little self-referential?”

“Not to worry.  In the kingdom of the barbarians, shit tastes like veal.”

“Yes, it’s kind of a crappy part; it’s some hick town in Texas; the salary is like pesos; I’ll lose my job; you won’t have anybody to abuse but, lest we forget here, I’m supposed to be an actress!”

“Directors are a very gray area for me.  It has been my experience that they actually like to be fired because they suffer from performance anxiety.”

“I’m going to play Masha because it’s the best part, and the most powerful person plays the best part.  That’s one of Hollywood’s ten commandments.”

“I mean, look at us.  Holly’s the Frankenstein monster.  You teach third grade.  I support myself as a murderess from midnight till dawn so I can do godawful plays for free in black box theatres built into linen closets in welfare hotels.  This is a career in the arts in America.”

Anton in Show Business is a very funny play that at its heart will speak to anyone who has sacrificed for a career.  Lawyers, doctors, plumbers, accountants, teachers…anyone who cares deeply about what they do will find the humor…and pathos…within the play.   

Thanks for reading and I’ll see you at the theatre…

 

Comments

---

Post A Comment

©2008 ACTORS GUILD OF LEXINGTON. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
Web Design by eLink Design, Inc. | Hosted by QX.NET