JANE MARTIN<\/p>\n
Actors Theatre of Louisville\u2019s 1981 New Play Festival (this was a few years before it became the Humana Festival), included a bill of short plays (this was before the \u201c10-Minute Play\u201d genre, which ATL pioneered, became a fixture in contemporary playwriting). One of these plays was a lengthy monologue entitled \u201cTwirler,\u201d whose author was Anonymous. I wrote about this in my chapter on the Humana Festival, but I\u2019m mentioning it again because this is where the saga of Jane Martin begins.<\/p>\n
We were in the Victor Jory Theatre, ATL\u2019s smallest of their (then) two theatres, in which the audience sits on three sides. The lights came up, and there before us was a woman dressed as a majorette, holding a baton. She proceeded to tell us how she came to baton-twirling, but she never became a True Twirler until her hand was crushed by a horse called Big Blood Red. \u201cPeople think you\u2019re a twit if you twirl,\u201d she says, \u201cbut they don\u2019t understand it\u2019s true meaning because it\u2019s disguised in the midst of football. It\u2019s God-throwing, spirit-fire.\u201d She describes a bizarre ritual the True Twirlers enact at the winter solstice in a meadow outside Green Bay, where they stand barefoot, wearing white robes. Their \u2018tons are 6 feet long, with razor blades set in the shafts, and as they twirl, their blood drips down onto the snow. \u201cRed on white, red on white. You can\u2019t imagine how wonderful that is. I have seen the face of God thirty feet up in the twirling batons, and I know him.\u201d There was stunned silence at the end. I looked across the stage at the people on the other side, who were dumbfounded. We realized we had just witnessed the debut of a major playwright.<\/p>\n
In those days, newspapers in major cities all had theatre critics, most of whom attended the ATL festival. There were also several international critics, such as Irving Wardle of the Sunday London Times. When the reviews came out, they focused on this extraordinary experience, and many speculated on who Anonymous might be. When the plays in the next year\u2019s Festival were announced, everyone was excited that one was entitled TALKING WITH, by Jane Martin, a bill of eleven monologues, performed by eleven different actresses, one of which would be \u201cTwirler.\u201d Jane Martin, we were told, was the pseudonym of a Louisville writer. Well, TALKING WITH became the sensation of that year\u2019s Festival, and the speculation as to who \u201cJane Martin\u201d might be increased. Some thought she might be Beth Henley; others, Marsha Norman.<\/p>\n
I got my boss at Samuel French to acquire the rights to TALKING WITH. This was the one deal he let me negotiate (with Jon Jory \u2013 more about this later), which was then done at Manhattan Theatre Club, with \u201cFrench Fries\u201d replacing \u201cCul-de-Sac,\u201d which featured a woman attacked by a potential rapist. She pulls a handgun out of her purse, forces him to cut off his penis, and ends with her marching him off to the nearest police station, where \u201cI want you to tell them exactly what happened to you.\u201d Predictably, several critics decided that Jane Martin was a man-hating feminist, which was why \u201cCul-de-Sac\u201d was dropped. We later included it in an anthology of short Jane Martin plays, entitled SUMMER AND OTHER PLAYS.<\/p>\n
Actors Theatre did a bill of Jane Martin one-acts, two hilarious comedies called COUP\/CLUCKS, in their regular season. When I found out that Dramatists Play Service had acquired the rights, I called Jory to express my great disappointment. I think it never occurred to him that Samuel French might want to publish them. He apologized and promised that Samuel French would have right of first refusal for all subsequent Jane Martin plays, a pledge which was honored thereafter, much to the dismay of the Dramatists Play Service.<\/p>\n
In several Festivals up until the one in 2000, there was a new Jane Martin play, and all were the most memorable events of each year. Some were hilarious comedies, such as CEMENTVILLE, about a troupe of very low-level women professional wrestlers, MIDDLE- AGED WHITE GUYS (see my Humana Festival chapter) and the last Jane Martin Humana Festival play, ANTON IN SHOW BUSINESS, a brilliant satire of professional theatre with a cast of 6 women, playing both female and male roles; some were extraordinary dramas such as MR. BUNDY, about the impact on a community when a sex offender is released from prison into their midst and KEELY AND DU (see my Humana chapter), which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, losing out to THREE TALL WOMEN.<\/p>\n
I have to say, I saw a lot of wonderful plays at the Humana Festival, but my faves were always the ones by Jane Martin. Speculation continued as to the true identity of this extraordinary playwright. Finally, most people assumed that the Jane Martin plays were the work of Actor\u2019s Theatre\u2019s Artistic Director, Jon Jory. I have a different theory. Here goes:<\/p>\n
\u201cJane Martin\u201d (or, \u201cMiz Martin,\u201d as Jory called her) was exactly who he said she was, a mysterious Louisville woman who didn\u2019t want her identity known. She wrote \u201cTwirler\u201d and most of the other pieces which comprise TALKING WITH. She may have been involved with other plays, such as COUP\/CLUCKS and VITAL SIGNS, another collection of monologues, though shorter than the ones in TALKING WITH. I do not think she was involved with subsequent Jane Martin plays. How do I know this?<\/p>\n
At a Festival in the mid-1980s, I met a member of the ATL staff who seemed very mysterious to me. I asked her if she was Jane Martin, which she denied. We became friends, corresponding frequently. In one letter, she told me that she had decided to leave Actors Theatre of Louisville and try her fortune in New York. She had rented a room in someone\u2019s apartment in New Jersey (Jersey City, I think). She had gotten a ride up to New York, and I offered to let her stay with me and then I would drive her out to New Jersey. Well, we drove out there and they guy she had rented a room from turned out to be really creepy<\/em>, and her \u201croom\u201d was little more than a closet. Forget this, I told her, you can stay with me until you find another place. She wound up living with me for a little over a year. She continued to deny that she was Jane Martin. Why do I think she was Jane Martin? Two reasons. First, she needed a job so I offered to make copies of her resume for her, in which she listed that she had been a Rockefeller Award recipient. This award was to a playwright for a one-year residency at a theatre. The year she had the Rockefeller Award, Jane Martin was Playwright in Residence at Actors Theatre of Louisville. Second, she was concerned that she had no health insurance. She had let her Dramatists Guild membership lapse, from which she had had health insurance, so I decided to renew her membership as a present. I called up the Dramatists Guild, who told me that they had no record of her ever having been a member. I asked her about this and she went white, stammering, \u201cI was a member \u2026 under a different name.\u201d So, it\u2019s pretty clear to me that my friend was, in fact, the mysterious \u201cMiz Martin.\u201d This was further confirmed by her parents who told me that, much to their dismay, she had signed over her Jane Martin copyrights to Actors Theatre of Louisville in order to get the rights back to a play ATL had commissioned her to write.<\/p>\n But what about all the other Jane Martin plays, and whatever happened to the original Jane? As to the first question, here is my theory. \u201cJane Martin\u201d was actually a committee. Jory headed this committee, one of whose members was ATL\u2019s Literary Manager, Michael Bigelow Dixon. Another was probably Marcia Dixcy, Jon\u2019s wife. The committee would meet to decide what the next Jane Martin play would be. One year, they decided that it would be about America\u2019s fascination with fantasy entertainment and they decided on a play about a ragtag group of professional women wrestlers (CEMENTVILLE). Another year, they decided to do a play about the abortion issue (KEELY AND DU). The committee would come up with the characters and a scenario, different members would write different parts, and Jory would put the whole thing together. Why didn\u2019t he just reveal the truth? Because he knew, rightly, that the work wouldn\u2019t be taken seriously if it was known that it had been created by a committee. Hence, the \u201cJane Martin\u201d gambit.<\/p>\n As for the original Miz Martin, I am ashamed to say I broke her heart \u2013 but that\u2019s a whole other story. She got an M.F.A. in playwriting from a major playwriting program, moved back to Louisville and eventually wound up living in northern Florida. Every once in a while, I hear from her and she tells me she\u2019s writing again. I hope so, but this has been going on for years.<\/p>\n Jon Jory left Actors Theatre of Louisville in 2000. Michael Bigelow Dixon left the same year to become Literary Manager of the Guthrie Theatre which, predictably, began premiering \u00a0Miz Martin\u2019s plays. After Michael left the Guthrie, I think Jory just took over writing the Jane Martin plays by himself, still perpetuating the myth that Miz Martin was exactly who he said originally that she was.<\/p>\n Why aren\u2019t the Jane Martin plays better known? Because Jory and ATL\u2019s Managing Director Sandy Speer (the \u201cJane Martin Cabal\u201d \u2013 Speer is listed in the copyright notice in all the plays as \u201cTrustee\u201d) refused to allow them to be done in New York, petulant that the New York critics had begun slamming plays which had premiered at the Humana Festival. Pisses me off.<\/p>\n Two or three years ago, I asked Jon if Miz Martin had any new plays in the works. \u201cNo,\u201d he said. \u201cShe has retired and is living in a yurt in Siberia.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" JANE MARTIN Actors Theatre of Louisville\u2019s 1981 New Play Festival (this was a few years before it became the Humana Festival), included a bill of short plays (this was before the \u201c10-Minute Play\u201d genre, which ATL pioneered, became a fixture in contemporary playwriting). One of these plays was a lengthy monologue entitled \u201cTwirler,\u201d whose author […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/playfixer.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/625"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/playfixer.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/playfixer.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/playfixer.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/playfixer.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=625"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/playfixer.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/625\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":641,"href":"http:\/\/playfixer.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/625\/revisions\/641"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/playfixer.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=625"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/playfixer.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=625"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/playfixer.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=625"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}