Quentin T Do Amateur Night at de Apollo
On the stage and off, Michael Martin is loud and opinionated. Playing the role of producer–of this or that low-budget, non-Equity production–he can always be counted on to tell you what he thinks of his show. Even as a company’s quasi-official PR guy, a position that requires some diplomacy with the press, he’s never hesitated to ring me up and tell me exactly what I’ve gotten wrong in my reviews, in painstaking detail. Onstage he uses the same persona. He doesn’t just step onto the stage–he occupies the territory, digging in his toes, and lets fly with whatever’s on his mind, as if nothing on earth can make him stop until he’s finished. This is a good trait in a monologuist, one that lends his work a sense of life-or-death importance and makes even his more mundane material fascinating.
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It’s also a trait Martin shares with a much better known blabbermouth, movie director Quentin Tarantino, the subject of his one-man show. Tarantino always tells us more than we want to hear about his life and work, packing more opinions, ego, and just plain chatter into ten minutes of speech than some filmmakers manage in a whole interview. Many directors have slept with their leading ladies, yet Tarantino makes a point of dropping Uma Thurman’s name, as if Pulp Fiction weren’t proof enough of his worth. If it happened to him and in some way elevates his prestige, he has to tell the world about it. Which may be why Martin completely disappears into Tarantino, despite this show’s ultralow-budget production on the ratty stage of the SweetCorn Playhouse, with minimal props and few light cues to speak of. Judging from the publicity photos, Martin has a special, Tarantino-esque prosthetic chin, but he opted not to wear it the night I saw him perform. The chin was not missed.
Martin has researched his topic well. He knows Tarantino’s life, his films, and the films of his competitors and colleagues; he even includes a bibliography in the show’s program (a Tarantino-like calculation meant to illustrate Martin’s intelligence for even the least attentive patron). Onstage he works hard to convince us of things that are evident at first glance; like Tarantino, he doesn’t always believe completely what he’s so forcefully saying. But that too is a common element in Martin and Tarantino’s charm–beneath all the bluster and verbal aggression lies vulnerability–and it only adds tensile strength to an already compelling show.
