By Donald H. Harrison
EL CAJON, California — I had to ask director Martin Katz whether he had been thinking about death a lot lately. His upcoming play at Grossmont College, An Ordinary Day, is a comedy dealing with a lady who plans to commit suicide, only she is constantly being interrupted.
It wasn’t so long ago that Katz directed another humorous play at Grossmont on the theme of death: Dead Man’s Cell Phone by Sarah Ruhl, which unfolds when a bystander answers the phone that had been owned by a stranger who just died, and becomes increasingly involved in his affairs.
Katz looked at me shrewdly across a table in the college’s Griffin Center where we both health-consciously were drinking water. He suggested that I was attempting to learn whether he had been delving into his “inner Woody Allen.”
Although I didn’t mean to imply anything quite so neurotic, I laughingly agreed. I hadn’t been clever enough to phrase the question that way.
Jewish and born in New York City into a restaurant-owning family, Katz’s early life had those points in common with comedian Woody Allen’s, but of course the two men’s experiences subsequently diverged.
As a boy attending summer camp, Katz said he liked to make up skits and perform in them, and considered himself pretty successful in his starring role at synagogue on the day he became a bar mitzvah. His mother, Ricki Katz, who used to sing professionally in the Catskills (sometimes referred to as the “Jewish Alps,”) was the star at the reception, singing several sets in her newly-minted “man’s” honor.
Katz said he really didn’t consider theatre as a career until after he moved in 1973 to San Diego and worked as an aide at the Project Oz center for troubled teens. At SDSU, he completed a B.A. in liberal studies that as an anti-Vietnam War activist, he had abandoned in Oneida, N.Y. Thereafter, on the suggestion of a volunteer at Project Oz, he took a class in acting from SDSU Theater Prof. Dr. Mack Owen, who later became a mentor and a friend.
Now 63 years old, Katz conceded in our interview that, in fact, he is interested in this “end of life stuff…. My dad died when he was 60, my mom died when she was 59, so I am older than my parents were,” he said. Also, “there is that ultimate thing, that fascination with what form does it take, and you’ve watched people die, and it is very tortuous, and it is very difficult, and it is the mourning process.”
But don’t get the idea that An Ordinary Day, co-written by Dario Fo and Franca Rame, is morbid or depressing; it’s more slapstick comedy. We agreed it could even be called “farce noir.” Scheduled to run Thursdays through Saturdays May 9 through May 16, An Ordinary Day will star as the would-be suicide Yvette Angulo, 27, a student who already has a bachelor’s degree in psychology, and who later enrolled at Grossmont to take courses in acting and in music. She earned praise for her appearance last year in the college’s production of Mauritius.
About Angulo, Katz enthuses: “When we were rehearsing, I realized she is so open, an absolute sponge. She is undaunted by the size of this part (on stage the entire play, most of the time alone)… She is extraordinary.”
This is acclaim indeed considering that Katz is no stranger to talented actresses. He is, in fact, married to one: Susanna Thompson, who currently plays Moira Queen in the television series Arrow. Other TV roles have included that of Karen Sammler in the series Once and Again, and, resonating with me and my 12-year-old grandson Shor, the Borg Queen in two episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation.
Katz and Thompson both are devoted practitioners of aikido, which Katz teaches to students ranging from age 6 to 80 at the City of San Diego Park and Recreation Center at Standley Park in the University City neighborhood of San Diego.
More than a martial art, said Katz, aikido is a “martial way.” Translated from Japanese, aikido means the way of living with harmonious energy. “It is a creative form, being able to move together, to accept someone’s energy, to respond to it, and to have a harmonious resolution,” Katz said. It has been described by others as a martial art that teaches respect for one’s attacker, specializing in defensive moves that are designed to minimize harm that might come to an opponent.
Katz’s own teacher was John Damian, who had served as a deputy sheriff in San Diego. Another was Mary Heiny, from whom Katz said he learned that “gratitude is a building block of all human relationships.” In the arts, he added “there is a sense of gratitude that you always want to be able to engender when you are working cooperatively.”
When he himself was a student of the arts, Katz related, Owen captured his imagination when he told the class “if there is anything else that makes you really happy and really satisfied you besides acting, pursue that. But if you know that this is what you have to do; if you know that this is your path, then you have to do everything that you can to prepare.”
Further, he quoted Owen as telling beginning acting students, “You have the right to make a fool of yourself!” Katz interpreted that as meaning “all the pressure is off then; you can try, you can experiment… or as Samuel Beckett said, ‘fail, fail again, fail better.’ It’s theatre. You try things. It’s activity.”
In teaching students to become actors, said Katz, “one of the things that I think that the colleges can do is to develop, within the student, discipline. I can lead a cast through exercises; I can lead a cast in what I think the play should be about, and how we are going to structure the play, but they are the ones who are going to perform, learn their lines. do their research. If they create a nice pattern of discipline in the way they work, then that’s going to carry them. And if they are lax about it, to go out and compete in a world where there are thousands of people who want that same part, it is very, very difficult. So what you want to develop is a pattern of discipline, where you really focus on the task.”
What does this mean in practical terms? I asked.
How can an actor prepare? he answered with a rhetorical question. “Your body and your voice are your instruments, right? So what can you do to make your body and your voice as effective as possible? You take care of yourself. There is a nutrition part of it, an exercise part of it, vocal exercises. And when you come to an audition, have you read the play? Did you research the play? Do you really want the part? Have you done everything you can leading up to that place to give you the best opportunity to get the part? And when you get the part, can you do everything you can to make your contribution?”
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Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World. He may be contacted at donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com