Departments
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Week of 1 October 1999 |
Vol. III, No. 8 |
Feature
Article
Obie-winner Martin to direct Huntington
By Eric McHenry
Nicholas Martin, an Obie Award- winning director known equally for his work with new and traditional scripts, is taking the creative helm at BU's resident theater company.
"It seems like a perfect job for me," says Martin, the newly appointed artistic director for the Huntington Theatre Company, from his home in New York City. "It involves a school, which has always interested me, and the Boston audience is generally regarded by the theater community in New York as the best in the country."
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Nicholas Martin
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Having first made his name in theater as an actor, Martin has spent the past decade building his director's credentials, largely in New York. He served as associate artistic director of the Playwrights Horizons Theatre from 1991 to 1993, and since then has done shows at the Roundabout Theatre, the Lincoln Center Theatre, throughout the Northeast, and on the West Coast. He directed a national touring production of Mary Louise Wilson's and Mark Hampton's Full Gallop, which also had a run at the Hampstead Theatre Club in London.
In May of this year, Martin received the Obie Award for Distinguished Direction of a Play for a New York production of Betty's Summer Vacation by Christopher Durang. The Obies, created in 1955 by the Village Voice newspaper, are a highly esteemed counterpart to the Tonys. They recognize achievement in Off- and Off-Off-Broadway theater.
The Boston Globe greeted Martin's appointment as a "rather bold move," given the Huntington's reputation as a producer of traditional drama. Although he has worked extensively with scripts by such progressive playwrights as Durang, his directorial credits also include plays by A. R. Gurney, George Bernard Shaw, Thornton Wilder, and Shakespeare. Eclecticism, he says, is "the whole point of me, if I have a point.
"I really like to do new work, and I really like to do established classics," he says. "And that, I might add, is what makes me slightly different from a lot of other directors."
The Huntington's offerings in coming seasons, Martin says, will be as various as his résumé. With the help of a literary department whose members will regularly read new scripts, he plans to select many works by emerging and regional playwrights.
Martin intends to direct two plays each season in the Boston University Theatre and to add a third when an additional performance space becomes available, which his contract stipulates will happen within two years. For the first production of 2000 he has chosen Sidney Kingsley's Dead End, which he revived in Williamstown three years ago. That production featured familiar stage and screen performers Hope Davis, Robert Sean Leonard, and Campbell Scott, all three of whom have indicated interest in the Huntington rerevival. Martin, who has also worked with such stars as Ethan Hawke and Calista Flockhart, says he hopes to use his contacts in the theater community to bring an array of guest actors and directors to the Huntington.
"There's a generation of actors," says Martin, "all about 30, who like doing their movies and their TV, but they really do it as a form of subsidy so that they can get back on the stage. Certainly Ethan does. Certainly Robert Sean Leonard does. Hope Davis does. These are very serious stage actors who just happen to be famous in other media now.
"And the nicest thing about them," he says, "is that they're no-nonsense. None of that self-indulgent stuff. They're a pleasure to direct. I'd like to think that we can groom the BU kids to follow their lead."