Williamstown's new honcho Nicholas Martin is as theatre-besotted at 70 as he was at 9

By Frank Rizzo

Nicholas Martin found his calling relatively late in life. Not his calling to the theatre: That came at a very early age—nine, Martin figures—when his parents took the youngster to see Oklahoma! on Broadway and planted the seeds of an obsession with American musical comedy that would never go away. But Martin’s primary professional identity—as a crackshot director of old and new plays, equally adept at animating classics and rediscovering neglected gems in the American repertoire—didn’t emerge for nearly another 40 years, when a synchronicity of experience, connections and good fortune came his way. By then, Martin, well past his adolescent fixation on musical-comedy stardom, had forged a checkered career as a character actor that was marked by bouts with alcoholism. But once he discovered what he truly loved in the theatre, directing, Martin’s opportunity to do significant work—and earn field-wide kudos for it—came full gallop.

Related Links: The Hedda Syndrome by Martha Hostetter, a discussion of Hedda Gabler productions, including one by Nicholas Martin starring Kate Burton (American Theatre) Rebecca Bayla Taichman by Sarah Hart, including a description of Mauritius at Huntington Theatre Company (American Theatre)

Martin was ready for it. He undergirded his autumnal-blooming directing career with the invaluable lessons of a long coming-of-age in the theatre—especially his early apprenticeship to Ellis Rabb at the legendary APA-Phoenix in New York—and proceeded to win the admiring attention of critics and audiences at such major American companies as San Diego’s Old Globe on the West Coast and New York City’s Playwrights Horizons on the East. The mature Martin thrived on the combination of freelance directing, teaching and occasional acting, and it wasn’t until he hit his sixties that he surprised himself by accepting the invitation to settle down—as artistic director of Boston’s Huntington Theatre Company.

At the Huntington (and occasionally elsewhere, especially at the Williamstown Theatre Festival to the west in the Berkshires), Martin fed his late passion for directing by embracing a full range of repertoire—from large-canvas plays like Sidney Kingsley’s Dead End and Tennessee Williams’s Camino Real to intimate fare such as Becky Mode’s Fully Committed and Christopher Durang’s Laughing Wild. He welcomed new work by emerging writers—Noah Haidle, Stephen Belber, Melinda Lopez—and imbued classics by Ibsen, Shakespeare and Chekhov with a vivid individuality. Whether he was working in New York, Boston or Williamstown, his large circle of loyal actor friends, gathered during his peripatetic years, rallied to his call and filled his stages—among them Kate Burton, Durang (wearing his actor hat), Victor Garber, Nathan Lane, Andrea Martin, Debra Monk, Campbell Scott and Mary Louise Wilson.

A varied roster of Huntington productions found their way to New York on his watch, among them Martin’s own stagings of Hedda Gabler with Burton, Butley with Lane, and Frank McGuinness’s Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Toward the Somme. The Huntington co-produced Theresa Rebeck’s Mauritius in its move to Broadway; The 39 Steps and King Hedley II (helmed by colleagues) touched down at the Huntington before moving on to the Great White Way; and last season’s Present Laughter awaits Garber’s availability from series TV. Martin’s debut staging of Paul Rudnick’s punchline-packed comedy The New Century just ended a lively run at Lincoln Center Theater.

Now, at 70, Martin is taking over as artistic director at Williamstown, where he succeeds British-born actor/director Roger Rees. It’s a theatre Martin knows well, and he says he is intent on continuing the festival’s tradition of developing new work (Rebeck’s latest, The Understudy, is part of his first summer’s slate of new work at the smaller Nikos Theatre) and serving as a haven for collaboration-hungry theatre artists.

As he wraps up his tenure at the Huntington and readies his first season at Williamstown (which he pulled together in a matter of months), Martin says he’s never been busier in his life. He’s leading off the Williamstown mainstage season with his staging, fresh from the Huntington, of the 1963 Masteroff/Harnick/Bock musical She Loves Me, running through July 12. And as if his theatrical dance card doesn’t sound full enough, he will also supervise a revival of John Guare’s The House of Blue Leaves at Los Angeles’s Mark Taper Forum in September and October (rehearsals start in the Berkshires while Martin wraps up the Williamstown season), then head back to Lincoln Center for a new Haidle play, Saturn Returns, before returning to Boston to remount last summer’s Williamstown hit revival of The Corn Is Green, with Burton and her son Morgan Ritchie.

The gregarious, candid and wickedly funny Martin seems to be nearly giddy with the workload, thanks in no small part to the promise of working again with so many of his buddies, old and new. For Martin, work in the theatre is not just an artistic experience—it’s a social one, and creating a delightful if not always comfortable place in which to work is the not-so-secret secret to his success.

FRANK RIZZO: What are you planning for your 70th birthday?

NICHOLAS MARTIN: I’m going to celebrate it by working on five plays all at once at Williamstown. By the way, did you know I have the same birthday as Judy Garland and Alcoholics Anonymous? That kind of sums me up.

What was your first theatrical experience?

I was carried to shows by my parents, like all Jewish kids of that period—we’re talking about the 1940s now. This was when we lived in Brooklyn, before we moved to New Jersey. So I saw the original productions of Oklahoma!, Annie Get Your Gun and all the Rodgers and Hammerstein shows. I was the prototypical gay, Jewish theatre kid, and I can date my passion for the theatre from those early experiences—like the moment I saw Ethel Merman in Annie Get Your Gun, although she was just a spirit to me then because I was so young. It was really Call Me Madam (which I saw 10 times) that made me understand that there was something going on.

How did you see yourself then?

I envisioned myself a musical comedy star, but I had clearly not looked in the mirror. I sang okay for a time, and then I started smoking and drinking and by the time I was 30 there was nothing [of my singing voice] left. I had told my parents early on that I wanted to be a musical theatre actor, and I was encouraged by them from the word go. There was never a negative word from my folks. I’m very lucky in that regard. I think they might have gleaned some idea of my interests when they heard “I’m the Hostess with the Mostest” coming from my bedroom. I was like the Man in the Chair [the musical-theatre obsessive in The Drowsy Chaperone]. I guess I was the Kid in the Chair.

Then we moved to Roosevelt, N.J., an enclave of Jewish garment workers and artists and their families trying to live inexpensively but still close to New York. It was an incredibly great way to grow up. That was near Princeton, and to me Princeton was the most glamorous place there was, full of tweed and pink button-down shirts, and I wanted all of that. I saw my first Shaw there, The Devil’s Disciple, before I was 13. After seeing the show I went home and wrote a musical based on it called Hang It All!, but the songs were all like “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend.” Of course, I saw myself as General Burgoyne.

I was quite a little hustler as a kid. I put on shows when we lived in Roosevelt, but by the time I got to high school I was soft-pedaling my theatrical interests in order to be popular. I was president of everything from student council to the phone operators’ club—anything to get out of gym, though I was also manager of the sports teams. I was much too busy to be in the drama club, but in my senior year I thought, what the hell. So I chose Out of the Frying Pan, which had a splendid part for me.

After high school you went to Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh.

When I was there—it sounds too pat, but it’s the truth—I was cleaning up the little theatre there, which was what you did when you were a freshman, during rehearsals of Antony and Cleopatra. I don’t think I had heard any Shakespeare in my life until then. I can remember putting down the trash bag and sitting there and listening—it was like a siren call for the theatre to me. And that whole Ethel Merman improbable life was obliterated, and all I wanted to do was talk like that and live in that world.

I also worked at the Old Globe in the summers when Craig Noel was artistic director. They would bring the most gifted people from a number of colleges—Alan Schneider was my teacher, and he took me there. The great gift of the Globe was doing all that Shakespeare and other gorgeous plays.

After college—New York?

It was 1959 and I couldn’t wait to conquer New York, but after a few months the only offer I had was to go back to Pittsburgh to be in Merlin the Magician for the Knickerty Knockerty Players. I played Knickerty Knockerty himself, a cheerful little dwarf who went in front of the curtain for the morning shows to recite a poem for the kids while they screamed, ‘Faggot!’ It was an education in humility to go back to Pittsburgh, where I had starred in shows in college.

The following year after college I met Ellis Rabb through [actor] Richard Easton, who knew my college roommate, [composer] Conrad Susa, who was then writing music for the new APA-Phoenix company. Being able to join that company in its second season was a very lucky thing. They didn’t even audition me—that’s how things were in those days. If you were fun at lunch, you could be in The Lady’s Not for Burning.

What were you like as an actor?

I was funny, but I know now I got away with stuff because I was very well spoken and well trained and I had a kind of charisma on stage. But I wasn’t really very good—I could never have achieved what I now know to be really remarkable good acting. But I was a funny little character actor, at home with the classics but not destined for the profession. I was a replacement in the original Boys in the Band and I did a little Shaw on Broadway. But I never got major parts. The truth is I was simply frightened of it all—I acted until I was in my early thirties, and then my drinking became really bad. [Throughout the ’70s] I was in terrible, terrible shape, and like all alcoholics not quite aware of how bad it was.

Did it affect your work?

Totally! I couldn’t work. I was unemployable by reputation—but I was still invited to parties. My friends kept me alive and my mother would slip me, you know, $20. For a while it was fun. I hung with a crowd that was very, very scintillating, but one by one they began to sober up and I felt myself quite alone.

When did you stop drinking?

I can’t be very glib or even interesting about how I sobered up, but the moment came where I hit rock bottom. Mine was no different from anyone else’s story, I’m sure. Finally, I called a friend of mine who used to drink with me and asked her for help. She said, “Just tell me how you feel.” And I said, “I feel lonely.” She said, “Well, you never used that word before, so hang in there and I’ll help you.” And she did. That was in 1978, a month before my 40th birthday, and my friend was Camilla Clay, a free spirit like Sally Bowles. She was like a madcap heiress, something from the ’30s, a great friend.

Everything changed then. I found the right relationship for the first time. Ellis Rabb had just opened up that gorgeous production of The Royal Family on Broadway and in the fall of that year, he was sending it out on tour. I played the butler, and that was the beginning of my new life as an actor—and as a human being. That was the last of the very great tours: Eva Le Gallienne, Carole Shelley, Leonard Frey and Sam Levene, the greatest of them all. That was a thrilling welcome-back-to-the-theatre event for me.

When did you start directing?

When I was 41. My friend [actress] Mary Doyle was teaching at Bennington College and talking about how great teaching was. I said, “I’d like to do that, but I have nothing to teach,” and she said, “Yes, you do.” But I had never graduated from college. I didn’t get the degree because I failed Italian and fencing. I took fencing four times. Fencing did me in. The school wrote me and said all I had to do for the degree was take a humanities course and another fencing course. My poor father, he wanted me to have a degree—but I just couldn’t take fencing again. Luckily for me the guy who was the head of drama at Bennington was someone who had been an apprentice when I was at the Old Globe, and he said, “Sure, come teach whatever you want.” So I did. Things were very free at Bennington. 

I was terrified. [Actress] Nancy Marchand said to me once, “The most frightened I ever felt was walking from my office to the classroom at Juilliard.” No Broadway show has made me more frightened than teaching young people. [Actress] Sandy Dennis, who I knew from doing a summer tour of The Royal Family and who was a great friend of mine, said, “Oh, you’re going to want to direct!” And I said, “No I’m not. I never wanted to direct before.” And she said, “You’ll see.”

It wasn’t long before I thought, “I want to direct a play with these kids.” They let you do anything at Bennington, so we did Under Milk Wood with 10 young students. I loved it, and something happened to me—I couldn’t wait to do another play. My second play was Camino Real—with 35 people. Then I started getting invitations from other schools, like the North Carolina School of the Arts, where Gerald Freedman had me down to teach and direct. I would advise young directors who are frequently too grand to consider such an appointment that it is a damned good way to do it. 

What is your approach as a director?

It’s extremely pragmatic. Once you’ve mastered the technical aspects of everything—learning about what lighting is and the like, and assuming you have that leadership ability—the greatest thing you can do for a play is to get out of its way.

By the way, I don’t believe directing can be taught. If I were a parent with a child who wanted to study directing, I would simply send them to a place like Williamstown for a summer or two and let them find out what it’s actually like—without a lot of theory. Let them find out if they even like it. Too many young directors think directing is casting or understanding the script or even staging—and it’s so much more than that. It’s the things that you aren’t taught at school and that you can learn only in a place where it’s all really going on.

I learned so much with Ellis, who was the greatest influence on my life. He was a very forceful, silly, silly man with a genius for the theatre. Ellis created an atmosphere in which the actors were so comfortable that they could do their best work. Many directors, especially the auteur directors of the last 25 years, do not feel this way. I am certainly an actor’s director, although one who gets less and less patient, I admit. You find yourself saying as you approach opening night, “Just do it!”

Did you think of directing professionally when you began at Bennington?

Not at all. I was still bothering people with my acting. I had gone back to San Diego to teach and direct at the Old Globe at the invitation of Jack O’Brien, with whom I first connected at APA-Phoenix when he was Ellis’s assistant. He wanted to be a director from the word go—he has 25 years on me in that regard. I had arranged a very comfortable life for myself where I taught at Bennington in the fall, then spent the winter in San Diego teaching and directing students in plays there, then coming home for a few days, and then returning to San Diego in the summer for acting.

I had arranged this life for myself. I had just met Victor Garber doing The Importance of Being Earnest at the Old Globe. We foolishly took it to East Hampton the following summer—Victor was Jack, and Don Scardino was in it, and Ellis played Lady B., and I played both butlers. It was a tour de force show that didn’t quite work. But Victor and I became great friends, and he started coming to Bennington and San Diego to see my shows. “You don’t have to do just college shows,” he told me. Then Don Scardino became artistic director of Playwrights Horizons. Victor called me and said, “You’re going to get a call from Don, and he’s going to ask you to be his associate artistic director, and I know you, and you’re going to say no, and I beg you to take the offer.” I was petrified at the whole idea. So Don called up, and I said no, and he said, “Victor said you’d say no but I’m going to call you back in two days.” Victor said if I didn’t take the job I’d be a hypocrite and a fraud, and I said, “Well, if you put it that way.” So I accepted the job and was thrown into the New York sea without my water wings.

That changed when you were asked to direct Jonathan Marc Sherman’s Sophistry at Playwrights.

Jonathan was one of my greatest students at Bennington, and we had a bond, aesthetically and emotionally. He had a mother who committed suicide and I had a boyfriend [actor Peter Burnell] who had done so as well, after we’d spent seven years together. Jonathan became a kind of wunderkind, winning all these awards like Stephen Sondheim’s Young Playwrights Festival prize. Doing Sophistry at Playwrights was my New York debut as a director—it was my shot, and a shot not a lot of 45-year-old directors get. The cast included Ethan Hawke, Steve Zahn, Calista Flockhart, Anthony Rapp and, later, Dick Latessa. That was the beginning for me and what [producer] David Stone calls “the world’s oldest overnight success.”

What was your last acting job?

The last New York acting job was in Alice in Wonderland [1982], where I first met Kate [Burton]. But my very last acting job was in The Show-Off with Sada Thompson at the Old Globe [1991]. 

Did you know that was going to be your last time on stage?

No, although besides becoming disenchanted about the craft of acting, I was beginning to forget lines, even in my fifties—too much drinking from years earlier. So I was more scared than I had ever been. But, overall, I thought, “This is going nowhere, and it’s not what I do best.”

How did your association with Williamstown begin?

Michael Ritchie. I knew him from the time I did an adaptation with Ellis Rabb at Circle in the Square of The Loves of Anatol [1985]—if you want to bomb out, do a Schnitzler play. Michael was the stage manager, and from the moment we met and started to laugh I knew we were going to be great friends—and then he married Kate [Burton] shortly afterwards. When Michael [became producing director of Williamstown] in the mid-’90s, he did a very smart thing: He sat down with his very extensive address book and started calling directors. At that point, I had only been to Williamstown as a spectator. I thought of it as a clubby little art camp that I didn’t want anything to do with.

Because you weren’t a member of the club?

Correct. I didn’t have contempt, but I wasn’t leading the cheers either. But Michael called me and said, “I’d love you to do a play for my first season, and I want it to be an American classic.” We settled on The Royal Family and put together a remarkable cast: Marian Seldes, Blythe Danner, Hope Davis, Victor Garber, Andrea Martin and Simon Jones. And I fell in love with the Williamstown experience. It was really magical for me. Although I had a very fast ascension in New York with shows like Full Gallop, Fully Committed and Betty’s Summer Vacation, I wasn’t learning how to direct big-scale shows. That came at Williamstown.

Williamstown also acquainted me with the intimacy of a theatre community in a way that I would not have quite achieved in New York. That’s because you’re living with everyone there for a concentrated period of time—which some directors might feel is rather nightmarish—but there’s great unequaled energy with all these kids and apprentices who are the lifeblood of the theatre.

Are large-scale shows a big part of your directing identity?

Well, I like them best because they’re the most fun to do. You can have a great experience with a small-scale work, but there’s something about your own sense of accomplishment when you do a Camino Real or Dead End or The Coast of Utopia. 

How did the Huntington Theatre Company enter your life?

I had become friends with Campbell Scott when he played Hamlet at the Old Globe, where I played Osric. When he did Hamlet again at the Huntington, I came up to see it. The theatre hadn’t been painted in years and the box seats were used for the stage manager and equipment, but there was still something about the theatre that hit me. It was also a night when there were a lot of students there, and there was this buzz about it. The whole place felt like what I thought theatre should be and could be.

I said to Victor, “You know I hate to say this, but I wouldn’t mind running this place.” And he said, “Oh, you’ll never do it.” I said, “You never heard me say that before.” So I called my agent, Gilbert Parker, that week, knowing that he had had inquiries about me going to other places like Cleveland, and I said, “I would consider...”—and this was very grand of me—“...Boston.”

Was there an opening at the time?

No! It was so high-handed and outrageous. Who is this guy—who’s been directing what, seven years?—offering to take over the theatre? But there was something about Boston—I knew the audiences were fabulous and smart, like they were in Princeton, and that they really wanted to go to the theatre to see plays. But there was no opening for artistic director, and that was that and I went on with my career. Then one day the phone rang and it was Gilbert and he said, “Well, lo and behold, [search consultant] Greg Kandel called me and they’re interviewing people for the job.” And, of course, I panicked, but that was the beginning of that.

How do you view your tenure in Boston?

For me, my greatest accomplishment, aside from the new-play program and the overall level of artistry, is that I made a great place for artists to go. Everyone loved to work at the Huntington, and they were comfortable, and the staff was full of wonderful people. It was a place to return to. I have to say on the Huntington’s behalf that I never felt aesthetically the crush of financial problems—nothing was ever denied me in terms of money in that regard, though it was dispiriting when the size of the staff decreased. And there were other frustrations, such as Boston not having corporate and state money for the theatre’s coffers. A city like Chicago has made theatre work in a downtown that supports it. That’s because the city and the state and the corporate high-rollers have invested in it, but in Boston that is not the case.

Other professional frustrations?

What every LORT theatre is looking for—is desperate for—is co-productions, but that’s very dangerous. It’s certainly on the mind of theatre boards, because co-productions mean you don’t have to spend as much money. The advantage is simply financial as far as I’m concerned. The disadvantage is that you can’t get the best actors because of the length of commitment and that both of the artistic directors have to agree on casting and the design team—which never happens.

What is artistic director emeritus, the title you will still have at the Huntington?

It’s what they call you when they still want the Rolodex—or the cachet of a New York name. But at the same time, they’d just as soon you weren’t really there.

What does your directing career say about hanging in there and finding out who you are—or even about life in the theatre?

Maybe it’s only about me. That’s why it’s dangerous when a kid asks me how I did it. I’m loath to give a blueprint, because my life was unusual. In a way, it was a brilliant way to get where I’ve gotten: To have spent my youth as an actor working with great players and rep companies that really mattered in a day when all of that flourished.

It seems that the social fabric of theatre is an important part of your identity and career.

No question: I think it’s genetic. My parents had lots of friends, and they were very active, vigorous people. For me, the art of the theatre is the art of collaboration, and it’s important to have people around me whom I love and trust—whether they’re 17 years old or 80. I think that communicates itself in the work.

Frank Rizzo is a theatre writer for Connecticut’s Hartford Courant and Variety.