Performing Arts

ADDISON – Terry Martin, 49, and Mark Fleischer, 38, are both skilled stage directors, but when working together they never fight over who's the boss.

LARA SOLT/DMN

Mark Fleischer (left) and Terry Martin draw on a long professional relationship for their new gig at WaterTower Theatre.

Partly that's due to the relationship they forged in the late 1990s, when Mr. Fleischer ran Plano Repertory Theatre and Mr. Martin was a new actor in town. Now Plano Rep is history, while Mr. Martin, the head of Addison's WaterTower Theatre, is one of the three or four most powerful people on the Dallas theater scene.This spring, however, he is going back to his roots by acting in Blackbird, a play presented by WaterTower but directed by Mr. Fleischer.

Their smooth cooperation hangs, in part, on similar views of a director's proper role in a show.

"I really feel that a director is a lawyer for the actors," Mr. Fleischer says. "As opposed to saying, 'Do this, watch me,' I say, 'I don't believe this would really happen that way.' I come into rehearsals with a hypothesis as to what the play is about, but it changes as soon as the actors begin speaking the script on the first day."

Mr. Martin calls himself and Mr. Fleischer "actors' directors," but he uses a different analogy.

"I'm just an audience member who comes early, seeking the best way to tell the story, to make it real for me," he says.

"Yes, we're both storytellers," Mr. Fleischer chimes in.

Mr. Martin was a much more experienced theater artist at the time they met. But Mr. Fleischer actually gave Mr. Martin his real start as a director. After building a substantial career as an actor in New York, Mr. Martin had moved here and landed choice roles in Dallas and Fort Worth.

Mr. Fleischer asked if he would be interested in directing the cult comedy La Bete for Plano Rep in 1997.

"I asked him, 'Are you sure?' " Mr. Martin recalls. "He said, 'You're always complaining about how bad directors are. Why don't you do it yourself?' I owe my directing career to him. I had never thought about that at all."

Only a couple of years later, Mr. Martin had become the boss at WaterTower. The two artistic directors were in nearly constant touch.

"For me, Mark just turned out to be the colleague I trusted the most or could best bounce ideas off of," Mr. Martin says. "More than anyone else in town, he was the one I could call after reading a new script and find that he had read it too and had an opinion about it."

Mr. Fleischer headed Plano Rep for 10 years before leaving for the Midwest in 2002. The stresses of moving into the new Courtyard Theatre had taken their toll, as had open-heart surgery followed by complications. Mr. Fleischer's new wife was a graduate student in Michigan, so he joined her to work on a Ph.D. for a while, then went into a graduate directing program and got active on the Chicago theater scene.

He interned at the prestigious Goodman Theatre and Victory Gardens and led talkbacks at Steppenwolf Theatre Company – including for this year's likely Pulitzer and Tony Award winner, August: Osage County.

Now Mr. Martin has brought Mr. Fleischer back to Texas from Chicago, where Mr. Fleischer is based during the winter months. Summers he runs the Adirondack Theatre Festival in upstate New York.

Blackbird is WaterTower's own headliner attraction in the company's seventh annual Out of the Loop Festival, which runs Thursday through March 16.

David Harrower's critically praised drama, which opens Saturday, is about a woman who confronts her former lover after many years.

Mr. Martin is paired with Jenny Ledel, the supremely impressive young actress who moved to New York shortly after winning plaudits as Juliet for Shakespeare Dallas last summer.

Ms. Ledel admits to some trepidation about working with two guys who have such a long history. When you put two people used to being boss at their own institutions in the same rehearsal room, you might expect a certain amount of friction or one-upmanship.

"I definitely feel like a fish out of water a little bit – and a little intimidated – but we're all on the same page," she says. "It's very efficient to work with people who know each other. It feels nice."Plan your life

Blackbird opens Saturday at 8 p.m. at WaterTower Theatre's Studio Space, Addison Theatre Centre, 15650 Addison Road, Addison. Also Tuesday at 7:30 p.m., March 14 at 8 p.m., March 15 at 2 p.m. and March 16 at 5 p.m. $10, festival passes $50. 972-450-6232, www.watertowertheatre.org.

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