Biography
Special Recognition... Highly Recommended, Times-Picayune: An Apology for the Course and Outcome of Certain Events Nominee, Best Supporting Actor, 48Hr Film Festival: Vikasita Critics Choice, Chicago Reader: Pattern Recognition, Smokers, Verbatim Verboten Highly Recommended, Chicago Reader: Hinckley on Foster: The Hearing, Krapp's Last Tape Highly Recommended; Times-Picayune, WYES, Ambush: The Bachelor in New Orleans Big Easy Award & Marquee Award nominees, Lead Actor Drama: A Christmas Carol for George Wallace Ambie Awards nominee, Lead Actor Play: Finding the Enemy Highly Recommended; Ambush: The Third Degrees of J.O. Breeze Highly Recommended; Times-Picayune, St Bernard Voice: Happy Days Highly Recommended; NOLA Defender, WYES' Steppin Out: Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Storer Boone nominee, Lead Actor Drama: Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Big Easy Award & Marquee Award winners, Lead Actor Drama: Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Best of the Year 2013, Lead Actor Drama, Times-Picayune: Long Day's Journey into Night
Selected Critic Remarks... Ever daring, however, actor and director Michael Martin turns this month to the very edge of the abyss with (take a deep breath)"An Apology for the Course and Outcome of Certain Events Delivered by Doctor John Faustus on This His Final Evening." A retelling of the legend of Faust, that long-winded title is belied by playwright Mickle Maher's blending of comedy and tragedy, as well as the swift intensity that Martin brings in the title role.... Giving a bravura performance, Martin reveals Faustus to be a tortured narcissist who must set the record straight for an unknown posterity. The"apology" of the title of the play is not brought about to seek forgiveness or as an act of redemptive repentance. Instead, it is an apologetic for his own life, an ultimate act of egoism. [Theodore Mahne, Times-Picayune, 2Jul18]
Michael Martin's intentionally digressive, train-wreck fascinating performance piece Martin on Hinckley on Foster: The Home Visit, in which the artist imagines himself in conversation with would-be presidential assassin John Hinckley[is] an exercise that yields sometimes facile, sometimes profound meditations on pop America. [Tony Adler, Chicago Reader, 2/1/07]
Watching Martin and Pauley together, two of the finest actors in town, is a veritable master class in character development. The characterizations may appear so natural as to be simple, but there is not a single move, nuance, gesture or vocal inflection that is not carefully chosen. --- A number of performances stood out this year, but Michael Martin's handling of the whiskey-ravaged old actor James Tyrone in Long Day's Journey into Night rises to the top. In a role that could too easily be tossed off as a drunken villain, Martin coherently revealed, layer by careful layer, who James Tyrone is. And as easy as he might have made it look, there wasn't a move or inflection that wasn't carefully and specifically chosen. It was a genuine pleasure to see such a master of his craft at work. [Theodore Mahne, Times-Picayune, 2013]
[W]hat 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. ...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. ...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, Times-Picayune, 2008]
Martin gives an energetic performance in this demanding hourling laugh fest. He convincingly portrays le charme malefique. [Dalt Wonk, Gambit Weekly, 2/19/08]
[He] makes Vanya a haggard, kindly, eccentric, outrageous romantic. The quirky characterization, which he manages to hold throughout the long play, works wonderfully. Martin is Vanya for every moment he is on stage, and it is impossible not to attend to his every erratic movement. His clear voice is effective, always swelling with grievance and frustration. He throws himself around in a manner just short of slapstick, so that we feel sad for him, but we don't take him quite seriously: this is as Chekhov intended it. Great performance! [Christina Vella, St Bernard Voice, 2008]
...[H]is 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. ...Krapp rummages around in his 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. ...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 the 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. [Justin Hayford, Chicago Reader, 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 his wryly self-deprecating performance as the angry but resigned Hinckley, whose pretense of recovery is gradually 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, 2/2/07]
Martin played the crippled troll creature with controlled agility and a well-conceived idea of this strange role...an athletically demanding character who bounced from desktop to chair to stage floor with kinetic intensity. In the scenes just 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. ...When one considers how he managed to keep his legs folded against himself when he hopped around, one cannot help but appreciate his awesome stagecraft. [Patrick Shannon, Ambush, 7/17-30/07]
One galvanizing performance can alter an entire show,[lay] waste to any misgivings an audience might have. Martin's stunner of a turn arrests the viewer with its meticulous build, lifts the acting of his co-star, and, as of this writing, is the male performance of the year. ...Martin's George is a revelation. Shuffling, mumbling under his breath, and infused with defeated resignation, the actor devises a slow burn of a character. He walks into the play a man who simply wants to have a quiet drink before going to bed. It is the cleanest, least pretentious objective I have seen an actor offer this year... His sighs become despairing beat shifts that indicate a trope of continual refortification in the face of his wife's withering assaults. Every time Martha lands a blow, Martin's George straightens his shoulders, shrugs off the pain, and fixes a pained smile before reentering the arena. And he does it while delivering his lines. I cannot emphasize that last point enough, because along with delving into the emotional darkness of broken man with a flicker of light left in him, Martin never forgets we have a long road to travel. ...[H]e drives the play with a steady beat of purpose. He also avoids playing a moment of it for laughs. His only audience is his wife and his guests, and that approach insures that patrons will be howling and roaring with every head feint, quick jab, and haymaker he executes. ...The three hours dissipate in the face of his triumph. Anyone who cares about acting in New Orleans needs to make the time to attend. [James Fitzmorris, NOLA Defender, 2011]
One of our most influential performers...a talent with an original edge and a furious urge to succeed. [Al Shea, WYES Steppin Out, 2008]
What a remarkable, courageous, eccentric, flaky actor Martin is; what a valiant performance he gave both nights. He's like a magician, explaining when a trick hasn't worked, but also explaining when it has. [David Cuthbert, Times-Picayune, 1/16/09]
