Family man Terry Martin begins his 15th season as WTT’s artistic director with ‘Bonnie & Clyde’
TWO AND A HALF MEN | When Terry Martin, left, and partner Chris Miller adopted their son Blake, Martin had been producing artistic director of Addison’s WaterTower Theatre for fewer than five years; this week begins his 15th year in the post. (Arnold Wayne Jones/Dallas Voice)
MARK LOWRY | Contributing Writer
marklowry@theaterjones.com
Many people figure this out as they get older, but 30 years ago if you told a twentysomething Terry Martin that he’d one day identify as two things he couldn’t fathom at the time — a director and a father — he might have laughed at you. But that’s exactly what has happened to the handsome 56-year-old, who this week begins his 15th season as producing artistic director of Addison’s WaterTower Theatre, where he directs many of the theater’s productions (and occasionally acts as well).
More surprising to him than becoming a director is that he has a 10-year-old son, Blake, who was his niece’s child when Martin adopted him at age 18 months. Blake was taken into Martin’s care at six months, and was later second-parent adopted by Martin’s partner of 22 years, Chris Miller.
“I think that when we were coming out,” Martin says, sitting with Miller in the living room of their beautiful north Dallas home. “It wasn’t an option, so I didn’t even think about it. It wasn’t until later that I realized it was a possibility, and then it happened.”
Likewise, he never guessed that making a living doing what he most loved — theater — would be an option. But it happened.
Martin grew up in the small town of Evergreen, Ala., about 75 miles south of Montgomery. In middle school he was cast as one of the kids in a high school production of Our Town; a few years later, he saw a college touring production of The Fantasticks and a national tour of Macbeth with Sir Antony Quayle. The theater bug bit and he pursued a theater degree at the University of Alabama, doing summer stock around the country.
“I was really a musical theater actor,” he says, noting that he played such roles as Pippin, Bobby in Company and the Master of Ceremonies in Cabaret. “I had no desire to be a director, it never crossed my mind.”
After college, he moved to New York, continuing summer stock and eventually becoming involved with the off-off Broadway Village Theatre Company, which focused on plays with a social message, such as Are You Now or Have You Ever Been? about the McCarthy hearings and Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart. He also found his way to an acting class that taught the Sanford Meisner method, which Martin now teaches at WaterTower. That’s when he became interested in directing.
But his life took an unexpected turn when, on vacation in Key West, he met Miller, six years his junior. “When I met Terry, it was instantaneous,” Miller says. “I was at the end of my vacation and he was just starting his, but we spent all night talking at the southernmost point of U.S. The next day, although [Terry] says he doesn’t remember this, I got in the car to drive to Miami, and he had left flowers on the windshield for me.”
Their talk must have been hardcore, because three months later after talking daily on the phone, in 1992, Martin left New York to move in with Chris in Dallas, who had followed his parents to Texas after growing up in Pittsburgh and Delaware.
Miller was a journalist who edited small papers in Cedar Hill and Midlothian and moved into marketing and advertising. He later opened his own marketing firm,
Rainmaker Advertising, which is now 20 years old and run out of their home in an office renovated from what was the garage. He is also a visual artist who often exhibits his paintings around town.
Although Martin had given up theater and was working as a paralegal, something he started as one of many day jobs in New York, he couldn’t stay away from it.
Eventually he auditioned and started acting at Stage West and other theaters. He soon met Mark Fleischer of Plano Repertory Theater, where Martin started directing shows like Journey’s End and Little Shop of Horrors.
Other directing opportunities stacked up, and before he knew it, he was in the running to lead WaterTower, which had been reorganized from a group called Addison Centre Theatre.
“To be honest, I wasn’t even sure I was going to be good at it, I was flying by the seat of my pants,” Martin says. “I didn’t completely agree with the programming the theater was doing, which I found safe and boring.”
But he got the job, beginning with an inherited season in the fall of 1999. Since then, Martin has kept the repertory season model, mixed with plays and musicals, comedies and dramas, works classic and new. In 2001, he launched the Out of the Loop Fringe Festival, which will happen for the 15th time in March 2015 and is DFW’s largest performing arts festival. WaterTower’s 2014-15 season opens this week with Frank Wildhorn’s Bonnie and Clyde, directed by Rene Moreno.
“I wanted to put plays on the stage that I wanted to see, with the understanding that I was in Dallas, Texas, in the suburbs,” he says. “I remember saying we have to invite people to come with us to the edgy stuff, we can’t start off all that way. You have to get them used to the idea that they’re coming to something they think they may not like.”
He’s also grown the theater to a $1.5 million budget, putting it in the top five of Dallas theaters, budget-wise — and it wasn’t easy considering the lean years after the 2008 recession began. In recent seasons, musicals like Spring Awakening and Dogfight have been hits for the theater.
But as hard as running a theater has been, it’s nothing compared to raising a child. Blake, a biracial (African-American and Caucasian) kid who loves soccer and writing scripts for his puppets to perform, is the joy of his Martin and Miller’s lives.
“It’s harder than you think it is,” Martin says about parenthood, “but there’s also nothing like it.”
This article appeared in the Dallas Voice print edition October 10, 2014.