A Decade on Stage

Interview by Evelyn Filleman, student writer

Tod Martin serves as the University registrar, supporting students as they register for classes, officially graduate and everything in between. In addition to his day job in the Anthony and Wright Administration Building, he also has spent his last 10 summers on stage with Searcy Summer Dinner Theatre. We sat down with him to learn more about this “great adventure” and how students continue to inspire him.

Q: How did you get involved in theatre and, specifically, Searcy Summer Dinner Theatre?

Martin: My wife and I lived here [in Searcy] 1989 to 1999. I was assistant to the dean in the School of Nursing, and I did all of the recruiting and marketing work and was the advisor for all the prenursing students for those 10 years. My wife and I had done some performing work in college, and we performed together in a SSDT show called “The Hollow” back in the ’90s. It was an Agathastic murder mystery. I was the murder victim, so I didn't have to learn a lot of lines because I was killed in the first act! 

Q: What other shows have you performed in?

Martin: The next year we did SSDT, it was “You’re A Good Man, Charlie Brown,” the musical. I played Schroeder. I'm still friends with several people who were in that cast. It was fun. The next year, we did “The Importance of Being Earnest,” and I was Algerbon in that Oscar Wilde play. Those were the three we did while we were here in the '90s.

When I came back in 2014 to be registrar, I thought it would be fun to do that again. So in summer 2017, I auditioned for a small part in “Father of the Bride.” Funnily enough, Dottie Frye cast me in the lead role — Stanley Banks, the father of the bride. That was a really sweet play and a wonderful cast with a great director. Dottie's fabulous. It just really formed a family. After that I was like, man, I want to keep doing this! I spent so much time together with this group of people and formed so many connections.
I'm still friends with everybody in that cast, and we still keep up with each other. At the end of the show, the daughter is really nervous about getting married and about the wedding and everything, and it's all come to a head, and it's time for them to walk in, … the music is starting. It's the dad and the daughter, just the two of us on stage. And there were several nights in performance where both of us, the actress and I, got a little choked up. 

The next year I did something really different, one called “Moon Over Buffalo.” It's a hilarious comedy about a man and his wife who are stage stars. They're middle aged, and they want to get into movies and everything. He's kind of a blowhard and thinks a little more highly of himself than he ought to, you know? This takes place back in the ’40s or ’50s, and Frank Capra may be coming to one of their shows. He's looking to cast two people in one of his new movies, so they're all excited about everything. The play starts by showing the married couple blowing off steam after a performance by stage combat. So the play opened with Mary Margaret Fish and I sword fighting on stage in full French Revolution gear. I had the long wig and everything. 

Q: What made this show so memorable?

Martin: My mother had died the previous fall, and Father of the Bride was the last play she got to see me in. So the next year, I just really wasn't feeling it. I actually wasn’t going to audition or be involved. I was just going to take a year off. Steve [Frye] said, “I really need you to audition. Would you please? 
I can't find the perfect person, and you would be great. I need you to do this part." And I said, "All right." It was the best thing for me to get into that, especially with a really great group of people, and just laugh my head off. It really, really helped me, like on-stage therapy or something. One of my favorite memories is a scene near the end where I, the drunk father, was confused about what play we were doing. 
So while he's goofing around backstage, trying to find his way through the curtain during a performance, the daughter, played by my friend Katie, is on stage, improvising. So Katie had to just make stuff up. Every night, the backstage crew and I were behind the curtain, trying to hold it together because Katie was just blowing the doors off. She's so funny. 

Later, I was in the musical “Comedy Murders of 1940,” which was a murder mystery thing. And then I did “Farce of Habit” a few years ago; that was fun, and I got to wear a nun costume. I was dressed as a nun smoking a cigar. I was this self-help author hiding out from my wife, whom I was divorcing, so I was trying to hide out until my divorce lawyer could work things out. So I had come to the middle of nowhere, Arkansas, to a fishing lodge to hide. And the play ended with me being led off in handcuffs and everything. Before that, one of the girls, a student, got to put this ridiculous fruit headdress hat on me, and then smear lipstick all over my eyes, sort of as punishment for the misogynistic character. For a student to get to do that to the registrar is really funny; the students love that.

Q: What is your favorite part of SSDT?

Well, part of the fun of doing dinner theater is I get to see a new set of students come through and just be amazed every time at how wonderful they are. I mean, we have incredible theater students here. ​​That's part of the big attraction for me, to be in the middle of all this creativity and this artistry; we have some real geniuses here. It's just so impressive to see the work they do. … Most of the people who are doing these shows are not doing it for any kind of class credit or anything.
It’s very, very much student-led, student-run, and student-performed. 

The other thing that's neat about dinner theatre for students is that when you rehearse a performance of a play or a musical, your first week of your run is a good run, you know, and you hit all your marks, and you say all your lines and do what you need to do. Then, about the middle of that second week, something clicks.
It's kind of magical. You're not searching for lines; you're not nervous about forgetting anything. You know where you're supposed to be next. You know where your entrances are, and you've done it enough times that it starts to become sort of a well-oiled machine. Once that clicks, then the fun starts. That's where the really magical improvement starts to happen. 

Q: What was it like performing “Noises Off” this summer?

This show was just simply so fun. We did three weeks of sold-out shows during the summer break and three performances of reprise after the semester started. We did the same thing with “Drowsy Chaperone” last year. It's a lot of performances, and we start rehearsing in June. It's almost every night, you know, for months. Even up until the last night of performances, there were still new things happening on stage. The audience didn't know this, but those in the cast knew.
Isaac Lennett, for example, was still pulling new stuff out of his hat. He was still toying with a line and making it just a little bit better. There was still some new physical gag he was trying that he'd never done before. That's part of the thrill, seeing the creativity of our students and how they never stop inventing and creating, growing and perfecting their craft. They never settle. They don't just hit into a groove and stay still, but they don't go over the top to make the director mad. A good actor stays within the boundaries of what's required of the character and what's necessary to tell the story, but they still refine and improve it all the way up to that last night. 

Q: How many students did you work with this summer? 


 There were five students in the cast, and four faculty/staff: me, Cassie Bennett, Emily Hutchinson, and Heather Stringfellow doesn't work for Harding, but she's in some kind of theater almost every year anyway. All the other actors were students. We had Anna Wright, Ari Chapman, T.J. Lennett, Paul Ryan and Ben Bingham. Ben played the director of the play that we were doing, and he was fabulous as always. 


Q: Do you think you’ll continue to be involved in SSDT?

 I don't really know how much longer they'll need a guy to play an old guy, you know? There’s been a couple of roles where I thought, I'm too old for this role. For example, a couple of summers ago, they did “The Play That Goes Wrong.” Steve cast pretty much all students or younger adults in that play. It was even more physically demanding than “Noises Off.”
I might have gotten hurt. It's probably best I wasn't in that. I enjoy doing it, but I don't ever want to take a role that could be filled by a student. They're here to learn, you know, and this is their career, their craft. I don't want to deprive them of that. 

But with “The Play That Goes Wrong,” I wanted to be in it so badly. I bought the script and auditioned and thought it was the funniest thing I’d ever read. As I said, Steve cast someone else. I was disappointed, but once I saw the play, I thought it was perfectly cast and knew I would have been out of place.