General Manager of the Lensic Theatre since February of 2000, Bob Martin has had a long and varied involvement with theater dating from his undergraduate days at Berkeley where he studied political sociology and acted in the Drama Department. His taking the part of Marti, the Marxist whiskey priest of Jean-Paul Sartre’s The Devil and the Good Lord, heightened his love for the stage.
For graduate school, Bob entered UC Santa Cruz where he began a doctoral program on Twentieth Century American Political History of the 1930s (“History of Consciousness”). He also kept acting and was deeply affected by the theater of the 1960s and 70s, including, The Bread and Puppet Theater and San Francisco Mime Troupe. In 1978, he worked on the “People’s Theater Festival” in Santa Cruz that included such influential groups as Teatro Campesino and the Asian American Theater with David Hwang. Bob served for a few years as a teaching assistant to Audrey Stanley who became the first woman to earn a Ph.D. from the Theater Department in Berkeley. UC Santa Cruz was a lively venue with Shakespeare Santa Cruz and residences by Eugene Ionesco and Tom Laird.
Bob received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and worked on funding and theater space projects, including the Eureka Theater (San Francisco) from which the first seeds of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America bloomed. He then went on to work for the Berkeley Rep and the Public Theater (Manhattan). While in New York, he was Production Coordinator for the Waterfront Harbor Festival and worked on the Statue of Liberty celebration. What all this varied set of experiences did was to reinforce what Bob already knew: “Theater was my real passion.”
From 1989 to 1996, Bob Martin managed the Cowell Theater (San Francisco) at the Fort Mason Center. This was his first significant experience with a house of 450 seats and opened the entire gamut of the “presenting world”—dance, drama, and music of local and national scope. Immediately prior to taking his position as General Manager at the Lensic Theatre, Bob consulted for two years with the Z Space Studio (San Francisco). During this time, he was still acting because he “missed being on that side of things.”
While acknowledging that Santa Fe is a music and visual arts town, Bob Martin has done a yeoman’s job of presenting, championing, and developing an extraordinarily wide variety of theater experiences for the Santa Fe community. From monologist Josh Kornbluth and Jewish juggling performing playwright Sara Felder to The Flying Karamazov Brothers and from collaboration between the Roadside Theater and Zuni Pueblo to yearly “Word for Word” productions by the Z Space Studio, Bob has offered a venue for challenging and entertaining artists. This year is no different with an “Under Construction” production of Nina Wise’s and Chaos Theory founder Ralph Abraham’s The Kepler Project, another “Word for Word” production from Z Space Studio (a stellar performance of James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues”), and Joe Spano as J. Buckminster Fuller in a solo performance that was revived this year by The Rubicon Theatre (Ventura) that is also being presented by Z Space Studio. I particularly look forward to a residency and set of performances by satirist and solo performer Mike Daisy who will be developing a new monologue “If You See Something Say Something” with performances on June 26 and June 28, 2008.
In a special election year series of discussions and narrative events, Bob Martin, along with theater artist, Nina Wise and activist Randy Hayes (founder of the Rainforest Action Network), will host a series of talks on issues of global import with visionaries and specialists in their fields who will offer “viable, affordable solutions available to us right now.” Nina Wise will take the major concepts of the speakers and create a performance “transforming the conceptual issues into complex, funny, and deeply moving narratives that move our understanding from the mental realm into the heart” (Lensic Performing Arts Center Press Release).
The Lensic under Bob’s stewardship has also created educational partnerships with area schools with over 20,000 students directly benefiting from a number of programs. Area schools that have performed at the Lensic include Santa Fe High School (an original piece under the guidance of drama mentor Joey Chavez), Santa Fe Preparatory School, Capital High School, Acequia Madre Elementary School, Ortiz Middle School, Monte del Sol Charter School, and United World College. Equally important, the Lensic provides “technical expertise and the infra-structure to make the drama experiences work for such youth groups.” Finally, there is an intern program for technical mentorship by theater professionals for high school students that may lead to summer paid internships.
The Lensic also provides community sponsorship to 150 local arts groups with the criteria for non-profit use of the facility determined by two key factors: capacity (400-500 people will use the theater) and programming appropriateness.
Bob Martin’s plans for the Lensic are quite simple. He wants “to sustain what we’re doing well” and “keep up the quality by not getting complacent.” His main “artistic challenge” is to retain “the high quality” of her productions while keeping prices “modest and affordable.” In response to my query about how he might encourage more locals to attend the drama productions at the Lensic, he suggests “going to things even if you haven’t heard of something. Trust it will be worthwhile. Take chances.” I have followed Bob Martin’s advice even before I knew what it was and have been rewarded by many memorable evenings at the Lensic.
Dates, times, and ticket prices for all upcoming events at the Lensic can be obtained by phoning the box office at (505) 988-1234 or by going to www.TicketsSantaFe.org. For further information about the Lensic Performing Arts Center, please visit their official website.
