Teacher, actress girds for an epic role

By day, Jill Cary Martin instructs young minds as a teacher at Costa Mesa’s TeWinkle Middle School. By night, she’s preparing for a stage role that would shock the socks off her local PTA.

Martin will play the central character in Golden West College’s production of Euripides’ “Medea,” the epic Greek tragedy (adapted by Robinson Jeffers). The play opens March 3 as, the latest in a series of classic dramas (“Oedipus Rex,” “Hamlet,” “The Hunchback of Notre Dame”) to unfold on the stage of the Huntington Beach college.

It’s an enormous assignment for an actress, comparable to an actor playing Hamlet, with basically the same bloody results. And Martin is ready to tackle this character -- whom she describes as “awesome and awful” -- with a vengeance.

“Medea is certainly larger than life,” Martin said, “and that is the point -- to show what ‘awful excess’ of anything can lead to, and for the Greeks, that was certainly disaster.” The word “disaster,” she noted, is Greek for “against the stars.”

Martin, who holds a master’s degree in theater and has trained at South Coast Repertory’s Professional Conservatory, has populated her resume with leading roles in plays such as “Hedda Gabler,” “The Rose Tattoo,” “Talley’s Folly,” “The Little Foxes,” “Private Lives” and “Rain.”

Even so, the part of Medea posed a particularly delicious challenge.

“It’s too juicy to resist,” she said. “Why should I play her? I was never the sweet ingenue, I guess. But look at the resume -- the strong ladies, the dark ones, many of them. And perhaps just a little personal identification here and there.”

Martin also describes her character as “a titanic tower of rage and wrath,” which manifests itself in the horrific climax of Euripides’ story of rejection and revenge. “She is beyond human in the strength of her resolve,” the actress said.

And while the newspapers have been filled recently with stories of mothers who have “snapped” and taken their children’s lives, Martin was most inspired by a story that unfolded a few miles to the south in San Diego.

“Betty Broderick is more or less my ‘role model’ for this play,” she explained. “When her husband left her for a younger woman, she went berserk ... She wreaked vengeance by murdering both her ex and her rival.”

Needless to say, there were any number of potential candidates for one of the juiciest parts for an actress the theater has to offer.

“Over 30 actresses read for the role of Medea, and many were quite good,” director Tom Amen said. “However, there was something missing in each reading -- what you might call the necessary gravitas to handle the titanic forces within the role. So I continued to search, and then, bingo, I thought of Jill.”

Amen and Martin had been colleagues when he was artistic director at the Vanguard Theater Ensemble several years ago, but they’d never worked together on a production. While at Vanguard, Martin had portrayed a pair of dissimilar Beatrices -- the sharp-tongued ingenue in “Much Ado About Nothing” and the troubled wife in “A View From the Bridge.”

“I’ve always admired her talent and passion,” Amen said, “and so it is great to finally have this opportunity to direct her in a role that I think is tailor-made for her considerable talent.

“She is definitely on top of her game in this piece,” he added, “and I think she’s going to knock ‘em dead with her performance.”

“Medea” will be presented from March 3 to 19 in the Mainstage Theater of Golden West College, with evening performances at 8 p.m. and Sunday matinees at 3. Tickets are $12 and $10, with additional information available at (714) 895-8150.

* TOM TITUS reviews local theater for the Independent.

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