Martin William Miller

When Martin Miller was hired as the executive director for TheatreSquared in July 2009, the fledgling theater company was struggling. It's not surprising, given the shaky economic footing across the entire country during the economic crisis of the preceding two years. In its fourth season, the company had recently whittled away its paid staff to one full-time employee, Morgan Hicks, who was extending a heroic effort to keep things running, but, still, it was simply too much for one person.

"There were so many bases to cover that we were just watching go by," says T2 Artistic Director Robert Ford. "We were so busy just trying to make it work." T2 had about 80 season subscribers, whose information -- kept in a binder -- did not always include contact information. The average show run audience was approximately 350 people, and the budget for the season's four productions and the Arkansas New Play Festival was around $160,000.

My, how the theater has grown. Miller has no problem rattling off the enormous strides made over the past seven seasons.

"$160,000 is about the budget for our next two-person show," he says. "Now, our annual budget is $2 million. This year, we're hoping to hit 1,500 subscribers, and the shows range in audience size from 3,000 to 5,000 per [multi-week run], plus a huge educational outreach program that reaches 18,000 kids a year.

"The attendance of [recent T2 production] 'All the Way' will be about equal to the total attendance of the 2008-2009 season."

"Under Martin's leadership, there has been rapid growth in each metric at T2, with more on the horizon," says Tod Yeslow, treasurer of the TheatreSquared Board. "Martin and Bob [Ford] have interpreted the theater's mission more ambitiously than even the board has, and they have calculated the steps necessary to move the theater more quickly toward its ultimate goal of being a nationally recognized and critically prominent regional professional theater."

Road Less Traveled

And yet, Miller's career path could have taken a much different route. In 2009, the former Fayetteville resident had just finished DePaul University's prestigious Master of Fine Arts program in arts leadership. The highly competitive program takes only two students a year and throws them right into the actual world of theater management. During his two-year stint, Miller served as an associate producer for the renowned Chicago Shakespeare Theater.

"Martin ... demonstrated both academic success and an entrepreneurial streak that set him apart from the other 150 candidates for the program," says Criss Henderson, Chicago Shakespeare Theater's executive director. "Even at a young age, Martin knew how to dream big and how to get things done."

"Rather than it being a practicum, or an internship, you're a full-time staff member at the theater, in an actual role," explains Miller. "And that's a big theater -- they have an annual budget of $17 million, and they do over 600 performances a year. They throw you right in. My responsibilities were managing and doing all of the fundraising for the annual gala, which raised almost a million dollars, and actually producing projects -- finding a director, hiring designers for this bilingual 'Romeo and Juliet' project.

"Learning was a by-product -- you were doing the job."

Working in this pressure-cooker of a job during the day, Miller spent his evenings and weekends attending business and finance classes at DePaul. He finished the exhausting two-year program and faced a fork in the road: He could stay in Chicago and take a position as managing director for The Hypocrites -- widely considered one of the most innovative and well-respected theater companies in the city -- or he could take a position as managing director at TheatreSquared.

Miller already knew Bob Ford and Amy Herzberg, co-founders of T2. In fact, Ford had directed him in three Arts Live Theatre productions when Miller was in high school. (Acting was Miller's gateway drug into the world of theater.)

"I knew he loved theater from the inside out," says Ford. "I knew he was a talented actor and writer when I worked with him when he was in high school. He wasn't just content to come in and act, he wanted to come in and do the publicity and the marketing and design the poster. He had all of these ideas, and they were all fantastic." The two kept in close contact through Miller's time at Chicago Shakespeare Theater, frequently talking on the phone to exchange best practices for running a theater.

"I had seen some [TheatreSquared productions] in the past, and I was blown away by the quality of the work and also by the fact that the theater was essentially empty," Miller says. "At that time especially, because there was a bit of a downturn in attendance coinciding with the downturn of the economy."

Miller says that there wasn't much to the salary negotiation. "Bob basically said, 'Yeah, this is the job if you want it,'" Miller says, laughing. "'I can't guarantee that the salary is there, so that's kind of part of the job -- if you grow the theater, you might get paid.'

"Come to think of it, it was a little silly-slash-audacious for me to say, 'Yes, I'm going to go and take a lower salary that is not guaranteed at a company that has only been around for three years in a region that has never supported a professional theater,' but I knew the region enough to know that it could."

"It was an extraordinary coincidence that he had just finished this program, one of the top MFA programs for theater management in the country, he loves Fayetteville, he loves Northwest Arkansas, and he was filled with ideas and excitement," says Ford. "It was an extraordinary coincidence and extraordinarily good luck."

The Road Home

So Miller found himself returning to his hometown in 2009, to take on a daunting task: Get TheatreSquared over the stagnating hump of the economic downturn. Miller says when he walked into the T2 office -- at that point, a 150-square-foot office off of the Fayetteville square -- all was silent. All of the other principles were out of town on business, and Miller found himself in an office with just his personal laptop and a collection of file folders and binders. Instead of being overwhelmed, though, he says he was energized.

"I understood that if the quality of the art is very good already, there's a huge head start," he says. "The theater didn't have a lot of money or a very big budget at that time, but they were really rich in terms of people and resources. Bob and Amy and Morgan -- these were people that any theater would be lucky to hire."

Miller dug in by immediately revamping the website. "The thing is, theater is story-telling," he says, "so I went to the first place where people could see our story." After that, he methodically re-worked the various other elements of the company that needed tweaking -- subscribers, payroll, contracts, marketing ... the list seemed endless. Yet, while reminiscing about the scope of the enormous job he had taken on, he sounds thrilled. Miller's wife, Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis, says it is typical of his personality.

"Fifteen different disasters can be coinciding in one moment, and the only telltale sign is that he'll step away to the other room for a phone call," she says. "For the longest time, I couldn't figure out how he stays so calm. But now I think it comes from his capacity to think with uncommon flexibility. As soon as Martin hears about a problem, he's thinking past it and through it and around it."

"I would say the biggest challenge was simply awareness," Miller says. "It was getting more people to take the leap of faith, to come in and see a show. We started sending out thousands of postcards for every show and doing list trades with the Walton Arts Center and finding out who were the people who were supporting other organizations in town and asking them to come to a show as a first step. These are the things that kept me in that office until midnight every night.

"They say, 'Dress for the job you want, not the job you have,' so we started doing that in terms of our publicity -- [TheatreSquared was] already doing these amazing things, so we started putting out more press releases, started talking about the theater as what it will become and not just what it was right then, and I think people caught wind of that aspiration and wanted to be a part of that."

"We have an unusual artistic director/executive director relationship," says Ford. "Before I hired him, I said, 'What does a managing director do?' and he said, 'It's my job to give you the freedom and the sense of security to make the art.' There is a massive overlap between what we do, so we rarely proceed without lots and lots of consultation, and I have never felt like it's money versus art, or that's the business side and he takes care of that, and I have the art side -- it's a partnership, and I rely on his good taste and judgment while also feeling incredibly well-supported to be an artist, and I think that's pretty rare."

Road To Success

While others offer ample credit to Miller for a large part of the theater's progress, Miller himself is emphatically generous in recognizing the team effort. Hicks, he says, single-handedly increased T2's educational outreach to the point that it now touches the lives of 18,000 children, and he says that his job benefited immediately from the bedrock of community supporters who were steadfast T2 boosters from the beginning and who are still a large part of T2's success.

"There was this core of people, like Margaret Rutherford, Denise Garner, Sandy Edwards and Bob Kohler, who are still on the vanguard with us right now."

There were some decided benchmarks in the past seven years that let Miller know, unequivocally, that he and T2 were on track to ever-burgeoning success.

"The moment we found out we were selected by the American Theater Wing to be named one of the 10 companies that they called the 'Best Emerging Theaters in the Nation' in 2011 was a really big moment," he says. "And about that same moment, we were working with the Walton Family Foundation on capacity building. We said, 'Listen, we want to be this theater that's three steps from who we are today. Here's how we get there. Can you help us get from there to here?' and they did. They awarded us a three-year grant that started in 2011 that allowed us to hire a dedicated development staff member, let us focus on some more support to artistic compensation for larger casts. I think that gave us the confidence to do not just projects that were at the level we could do but were at a level beyond that.

"It's always been part of what we do -- we kind of say, as though we're climbing a mountain, 'Let's throw our pick ax up there and drag ourselves up there.' We're going to do something a little bit more ambitious, a little bit more profound, and then by the time we're done with that we'll be the company that could do that in the first place."

With professional success a fixture in Miller's life not long after returning to Fayetteville, success in his personal life soon followed. Margulis -- professor and director of the Music Cognition Lab at the University of Arkansas and author of On Repeat: How Music Plays the Mind -- met Miller while serving on the Fayetteville Arts Council together.

"I may have known what I wanted to do in my career when I got here, but I was at a total loss in terms of where I was going in my personal life, and the first real compass was Lisa," Miller says, eyes shining. "She had these two amazing kids, and now we have three amazing kids, and it's just ... it's just the best thing ever."

"Martin is the single most creative person I know," says Margulis. "He's so relentlessly creative that I sometimes find it intimidating. Every night, Alexander and Nikolai provide a subject -- tonight it was 'orangutan' and 'apple' -- and Martin improvises a rhyming lullaby that combines their suggestions. His creativity shines through in everything he does, from cooking to storytelling to party planning to grant writing to envisioning and stewarding a future for TheatreSquared.

"I like to think his unflappability and sense of fun have rubbed off on all of us. Even though we all have 800 things going on, you never know when we might drop everything for a giant driveway water balloon fight."

Down The Road

Miller's creativity right now is focused on TheatreSquared's most ambitious project to date: T2 will be breaking ground on their new theater in 2017, and the 2019 season will be the first performed in the space. The design for the theater, funded by a grant from the Walton Family Foundation, will be revealed on November 3.

Miller fairly vibrates with excitement as he talks about the new building.

"I can certainly tell you that within the building are all of the spaces you need to put on a great show, but beyond that, it feels like a community landmark," he says. "It is so exciting to imagine something like this, that for the next 50 or 100 years, people are going to go into this building and see a production in one of two venues -- something that was built right there in the building, something that was costumed right there in the building, something that was marketed, produced right there in the building.

"I think it's going to be one of the first buildings anywhere in the country to combine all of these functions in this kind of footprint. People will travel here to look at how we did it. It's an amazing building. Buildings are just vessels, but this one is going to tell a story. It's all of us under one room, and that includes the community."

"This building will ... open up opportunities where creativity and imagination can run rampant," promises Yeslow.

"We would not be building this theater if it weren't for Martin," says Ford. "His vision, the size of his vision, and the understanding of what it will actually take, is extraordinary. ... I can't even describe how smart he is and how big his heart is. And how deeply he cares for this project and this theater company and our audience."

From where Miller stands, the choice he made at the fork in the road in 2009 was indisputably the correct one, and he calls the possibility that he might have made a different one "terrifying."

"Weirdly, it feels as though this were the only path," he says. "Maybe it's a fallacy to think that I could have gone any other way. This is clearly where I was supposed to be, both in my personal life and professionally.

"People say, 'You make your own luck,' but that's only so true. I was so lucky to know Bob, and to get to know Amy, and Morgan, and everyone who is part of this team now. We are doing a level of work that belongs at a theater twice our size, because we have amazing people doing every job at this theater. Just in terms of that luck -- to be the emerging professional theater at the moment that the region realized it needed one?

"That's pretty lucky."

NAN Profiles on 10/30/2016