Joe Martin (writer)

In Vancouver, he worked five years developing Open Theatre Projects, and co-directing classic plays, with Shakespearean actor Dermott Hennelly (Noel Burton) before leaving for Scandinavia.

Martin's play, The Dust Conspiracy won the Source Literary Prize in 1985. He later produced Deceit: Or Crime with Class, and Forfeit: A Play in Twelve Rounds at the Source Theater Festival. These plays and production credits are published in the collection Conspiracies: Six Plays.[3]

In 1987, Martin produced the Strindberg Festival in Washington, D.C. . He directed The Ghost Sonata at Metro Stage (then American Showcase Theatre), and produced three Strindberg one-acts at Source Theatre and Carl XII in a staged reading at the Shakespeare Theatre Company. He would later serve as dramaturg/consultant for Michael Kahn's production of Peer Gynt in 1998.[4]

Martin's professional directing and producing credits for Open Theatre/CITE and Open Theatre/TUTA over 15 years included some of his own plays and adaptations: an epic play about the guillotine, Anatole's Lover: The Receiver; Parabola: Tales of the Wise and the Idiots (a dance theatre work choreographed by Anne Bassen); The Match Girl's SNOW QUEEN—created with DC composer Anna Larson[5]--Woyzeck, with a score for live brass by Larrance Fingerhut, Three Plays by Brecht (or "The Wedding/The ChalkCross/The Beggar"),[6] a touring production of Quartet by Heiner Mueller[7]—both directed by Serbian ex-pat director Zejlko Djukiic, and later Strindberg's A Dream Play and Rumi's Mathnavi.[8]

In the 1990s, he translated and created works from Mexico. With Iona Weissberg, he translated Mexican playwright's Juan Tovar's montage of works by Mexican author Juan Rulfo, The Crossroads (Los Encuentros), in 1994[9] (produced by Ensemble International in New York.) This led to a collaboration between Tovar and Martin on a work in both English and Spanish, El Trato, concerning an ill-fated attempt at a trade treaty between the US and Mexico in the mid-19th century eventually presented in Spanish by La Compañía Nacional de Teatro in Mexico City[10] and at Gala Teatro Hispano in a staged reading in Washington DC. An English readers-theatre version was produced by CITE and the Mexican Cultural Institute that toured the Washington area.

An epic play about a heroine of the French Resistance who was the daughter of a renowned Indian musician who first brought Sufism to the West, SOUNDWAVES: The Passion of Noor Inayat Khan, presented first at The Brecht Forum, later by Bridge Theatre Group at the New York International Fringe Festival in 2013 and again by EnActe Arts Theatre.[11] Other productions include his 2016 staging of Dario Fo's They Don't Pay? We Won't Pay?--revised before the Nobel prize winner's death, at Flashpoint Theatre in Washington DC.[12]

Martin taught from 1990 to 2001 in the Department of Performing Arts at American University. In 2000, as a Fulbright Scholar in Romania, he taught American Drama at University of Bucharest,[13] and directed the graduating class at the University of Theatre and Film in Jose Rivera's Marisol.[14] Later, he worked in Europe and the Middle East as a Fulbright Specialist in Theatre, directing and creating college arts curricula in Jerusalem and the West Bank in 2011, and in Bethlehem at Dar al Kalima University in 2014. The two theatre projects culminated in essays collected in Staging Athol Fugard in Palestine--And other Essays.

In 2002–2006, Martin taught theory and criticism and devised theatre at Catholic University of America. Since 2008, he has taught playwriting and dramatic literature as a senior lecturer for the Theatre Arts and Studies program at Johns Hopkins University.[15]