Theater

Meet Nicholas Martin

by Carolyn Clay

MARTIN: saving the razorblades for next season.

"I think there's a lot of poetry in the season," remarks incoming Huntington Theatre Company artistic director Nicholas Martin of the theater's just-unveiled 2000-2001 season, the first under his reign.

Indeed, the poet A.E. Housman and Molière as coupleted by Richard Wilbur are both part of Martin's opening act. But the curtain goes up first on a reprise of the director's own extraordinary cast-of-thousands 1997 Williamstown Theatre Festival staging of Sidney Kingsley's 1935 melodrama Dead End, with Robert Sean Leonard and possibly Campbell Scott reprising their Williamstown roles. That's to be followed by Jon Robin Baitz's A Fair Country, which connects domestic and political drama in its tale of an American family living in South Africa in the 1970s; the East Coast premiere of Wilbur's verse translation of Molière's rarely produced Amphitryon, a "blend of high comedy and slapstick antics" that takes the French dramatist out of 17th-century wig-land and back to ancient Greece; Huntington audience favorite Tom Stoppard's The Invention of Love, which ferries poet, classicist, and closeted homosexual Housman from the punts of Oxford to the River Styx; and one of famed African-American writer James Baldwin's two plays, The Amen Corner, a Harlem-set drama filled with gospel music that was first produced in 1965.

The season also will include a co-production, with Broadway in Boston/SFX Theatricals at the Wilbur Theatre, of Martin's recent Off Broadway hit, Becky Mode's Fully Committed, in which a virtuosic Mark Setlock plays the roles of more than 40 people trying to book a table in a trendy Manhattan restaurant. And Martin, who praises Boston audiences and predicts that the city "is experiencing the initial rumblings of a renaissance in theater," pledges a second stage for the Huntington (probably in the proposed expansion of the Boston Center for the Arts), which will allow it to produce new plays. He also promises a more solid connection between the Huntington and "grand patron" Boston University School for the Arts.

Martin, an erstwhile actor and award-winning director, replaces outgoing producing director Peter Altman, whose contributions were behind the scenes. Martin promises to be a lot more "out there." His first season is intended to provide "some daring," he says, but also ease of transition. Asked why he did not include his Obie-winning production of Christopher Durang's melange of sex and serial murder, Betty's Summer Vacation, in the opening gambit, Martin replies, "You don't have to come in swinging, with razors in both hands, the first season." Presumably he'll be sharpening his Sweeney Todd act for season two.