MICHAEL [s1] MARTIN

50 has come and gone: Got to punch up the ole profile. Add video and better graphics too, some lazy day.
So. A weakling, a coward, a pervert and a slob...really a bad bargain all around: Should I even mention that decades of insomnia and smoking have left me looking like 40 miles of bad road?...I kinda sorta compensate for my shabby character by judiciously deploying dwindling reserves of wit and talent, avoiding situations where a sense of ethics or morality might prove decisive, and pretending to take kind interest in the destinies of people about whom, honestly, I could care less. 99 days out of 100, this veneer of niceness gets me and my intimates through unscathed, even content. But on Day 100, you want to be in some other city.
Also I'm short, watch too much TV, am meagerly employed, and have more kinked fantasies than is seemly in one so ill-equipped to fulfill them.
Most of my free time is devoted to making theater (writer, director, actor, producer: at one time or another everything but costume design) that usually only a select few want to sit through. The newer and smarter and weirder, the better.
Every now and then I have a hit, which is to say, a show that breaks even.
The rest of my free time is devoted to my beloved Eric--11 years now!--and to our house, more or less in alternation.
Born and raised in Minneapolis, came to maturity (or anyway age) in Chicago. A New Orleans resident for six years.
Here's a selection of the nice things that've been written about me. I'll add the bad reviews as I find them:
"Few situations offer as much potential for exhiliaration and intimidation as striking up a conversation with Michael Martin. He may be one of the most unassuming, down-to-earth guys hanging around the Lunar Cabaret, but his Olympian intellect tends to reduce us mere mortals to mental midgets. Trying to find a topic on which Martin can't offer the definitive word--despite his sincere protestations of having read only "a bit" of Foucault or "a few" of David Mamet's plays--is like dredging the Atlantic for a lost contact lens. But in "Pattern Recognition," which premiered in February in the Rhino in Winter festival, the bookish Martin gets his comeuppance in the school of hard knocks. Set in the early years of the Reagan administration, during "those dwindling Mornings in America before we all woke to the realization that poverty would have to be designated a lifestyle choice to account for the astonishing number of citizens pursuing it," Martin's monologue leads us through sobering moments "when one grasps, without possibility of slippage, exactly what one is made of." During his first lesson, immobilized on the sofa while his brother brutalizes his wife in another room, Martin learns he is made of pure cowardice. "Intelligence," he confides, "counts as nothing beside courage." Martin reinvigorates the confessional monologue, a decidedly exhausted form, by recasting his life as an archetypal journey toward the pathologically unrecognized self."
[Justin Hayford in the Chicago Reader, 1996 or so]
"Michael Martin's "The Bachelor in New Orleans" is what Hal Holbrook might be like playing Mark Twain while drinking Sazeracs. Dressed in foppish finery, declaiming ornamental language from another era, he's an aristocratic barfly, a John Barrymore in his later years, when his self-mocking, crazily courageous comic performances would rise above his circumstances.
"[H]is performance...has become heightened, funnier and much more assured....As he plays him now, "The Bachelor" is a variant on our old friend, the French Quarter 'character,' who bursts into a bar from the street, puts a smile on your face with his spiel and just as he's about to wear out his welcome, vanishes into the night.
"It's a bravura turn that requires the guts of a burglar. A 90-minute monologue is tough enough to put across on the stage. Performing in a bar, interacting with customers who can be unpredictable, requires a special set of skills. Think matador and bull.
"...It's a performance of extremes. A quiet, well-mannered politesse can turn into a Shakespearean roar; Lear against the elements. Martin wages this battle with garrulous good humor and quicksilver mood changes, adapting his approach to a constantly changing human landscape. It is this that gives the piece and his performance a certain stature.
"He is on the high wire and could fall at any moment, but somehow manages to keep his balance."
[David Cuthbert in the Times-Picayune, 2008]
Martin gives an energetic performance in this demanding hourlong laugh fest. He convincingly portrays 'le charme malefique..."
[Dalt Wonk, Gambit Weekly, 2008]
"On opening night the show that seemed destined for humorless disaster was Clove Productions’ "Krapp’s Last Tape," the elegant 1958 one-act in which the decrepit Krapp listens with unmitigated disdain to tapes he recorded of himself 30 years earlier. It started 45 minutes late, and performer Michael Martin spent much of that time nervously running—and bungling—his lines in the lobby. But by the time he finally appeared onstage, his mane of gray hair as disheveled as his ill-fitting black trousers and vest, his incongruous white shoes polished to a Sunday-school gleam, he’d mastered this heartbreaking buffoon. Shuffling stiffly to an enormous desk covered with an ancient reel-to-reel tape deck and a dozen battered boxes of tape spools, he lowered himself into a chair with arthritic care, placed his hands neatly before him, and let out a tiny sigh, which left him as limp as a deflated balloon.
"For the play’s 45 minutes Krapp rummages around in the desk, eats a banana (slipping on the peel, of course), fumbles with his tapes, exits to take swigs from his bottle backstage (the audience hears only a dainty pop as he uncorks it), and finally listens to his former self rambling on about seemingly nothing—though it gradually becomes evident that the tape may recount how he blew his one chance at true love. Under Beau O’Reilly’s meticulous direction, Martin plays the scene as a very funny grumbling clown routine. Each tiny accomplishment—finding the right tape spool or feeding it into the player—brings a fleeting moment of joy even as the accumulated weight of a squandered life squashes this rail-thin Krapp farther down in his chair. As Martin sits motionless listening to the tape, his expression by turns contemptuous, sly, forlorn, defeated, childlike, and empty, he creates a pitiful and absurd old man, someone who sees that his effort to create a brilliant chronicle of his life has fallen tragicomically flat."
[Hayford in the Reader, I think 2006]
“Martin's one-man piece is a tour de force of desperate, Dostoyevskian fury…a minor masterpiece in the grand tradition of the overliterate madman, concealing layers of truth beneath its ravings, swinging assuredly between persuasive and preposterous. …But what really sells the piece is Martin's wryly self-deprecating performance as the angry but resigned Hinckley, whose pretense of recovery is graduallly broken down by invisible tormentors. Memorizing this drifting, looping, hour-plus monologue alone is a feat, and Martin was virtually flawless the night I attended, navigating the emotional ebb and flow of the slowly splintering Hinckley with unassuming genius. Since Martin is moving to New Orleans in the spring, this may be the last chance to see his amazing work for some time.”
[Brian Nemtusak, Reader, 2002]
“Martin proves again that he is one of our best character actors as Mr. Cohen, whose “horse doesn't circle the whole track.” He is funny, sincere…”
[David Cuthbert, Times-Picayune, 2007]
“Martin played the crippled troll creature, the J.O. Breeze of the title, with a controlled agility and a well-conceived idea of this strange role. He created a very athletically demanding character who bounced from desktop to chair to stage floor with kinetic intensity. In those scenes in which just by sitting on his desk in the glow of a red light, wearing a frayed clown collar and ghastly makeup, he established a remarkable and theatrically effective stage presence…. And when one considers how he managed to keep his legs folded against himself when he hopped around the stage, one cannot help but appreciate his awesome stagecraft.”
[Patrick Shannon, Ambush, 2007]
THE AMUSING:
[T]he accomplished Michael Martin, as the sculptor, is appearing with stitches and minus several teeth after a rehearsal accident when he was accidentally hit with a can thrown by onstage girlfriend, who makes a vivid impression as the more sympathetic of these two self-involved artsy types.
(What exactly must I do to be "the more sympathetic"?)
It takes awhile to locate and identify the characters, since director Michael Martin deliberately moves them around...
(Dammitall! The director is moving the actors around, on purpose.)
Michael Martin has become one of our most influential performers, a talent with an original edge and a furious urge to succeed.
("Furious urge to succeed," indeed.)