By Matt Levy
May 17, 2020
When one says, “Senior year of high school,” memories come flooding back. Applying for higher education. Parties. Prom. For writer and actor Travis Martin, it’s when he found himself artistically. Martin, the Bethesda, MD native began acting and wrote and self-published the novel Lion’s Heaven for the creative part of his senior thesis. Despite “No harm, no foul” being his yearbook quote, they’re a far cry of the man who, after struggling for quite a bit as a child, was beginning to find his voice.
The son of a freelance archivist mother and a litigator in environmental law father, Martin dealt with speech and language difficulty growing up and was made fun of for being too quiet. As someone who didn’t have a lot of present thinking, he would compensate by pretending and retreating into his imagination. To overcome and manage this, he went to an art-based special education school called the Lab School of Washington where he was taught to overcome his speech and language difficulties in order to speak without pausing or thinking of what word he needed to say. Despite these advantages in education, he continues to struggle with this difficulty. If you ever see Travis being quiet and/or staring, it’s either because he’s deep in thought and completely unaware of his surroundings or he’s staring at you but doesn’t know the right words to approach. He soldiered on, just as William Ernest Henley did when writing Invictus: “I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul,” he would say to himself to get through.
That optimistic outlook certainly did get him through and inspired the fantastical world of his crowning achievement Lion’s Heaven. The story takes place in an alternate universe, where machine-animal deities rule. It centers around 18-year-old Liger, an orphan from the fictional city of Olecia who develops strange powers to create things from his mind. He goes on a remarkable journey to discover the origins of his newfound abilities and stop a death cult from resurrecting a destructive God. Martin was a fully aware author at just 18–19 years old; he wrote about himself in a way reserved for writers decades into their careers.
Even more impressive is Travis never even imagined he would write a complete novel when he first set pen to paper that fateful senior year. It was originally meant to be a short story on the monomyth, or the hero’s journey, and ended up expanding until the text exceeded 230 pages. Inspired by mythology like Egyptian and Greek Gods, the Norse, and Christianity combined with his thoughts on technology and humanism led to him speedily completing Lion’s Heaven in a month with three weeks of editing. Martin left high school with his novel already published on Amazon (currently averaging a rating of 4.5 stars), and headed to college to work with like-minded creators.
He began acting in short films and taking extra gigs while acquiring his Bachelors of Art in Film Studies and Production with a minor in Drama at Hofstra University where he graduated Cum Laude. He used his brief knowledge of Chekhov and Meisner technique, to allow him to transform into something different, whether subtly or to an extreme similar to actors he admires such as Christian Bale, Daniel Day-Lewis, Tilda Swinton, and Gary Oldman.
After graduating, he began to audition for plays (multiple friends and a stranger at the laundromat have told Travis he “look(s) like Ryan Gosling.” He doesn’t see it but you be the judge), shorts and features and landed an Off-Off-Broadway gig as the titular Cyclops in The Cyclops. This led to other Off-Off-Broadway roles and he eventually landed a role in the Off-Broadway A Therapy Session with Myself. While working steadily as an actor, he also edited the sequel to Lion’s Heaven and wrote and directed the short films The Resident and Afterthought. Following these creative triumphs, Travis made his theatrical directorial debut with the short play Where’s Avis for the LIC One-Act Play Festival.
For a man who has accomplished so much and worked with so many in theatre and film, he wanted to point out that his favorite collaborator in the theatre is his director Holly Payne-Strange. She was the first person who cast him which led to a fruitful partnership and they have since worked together three more times in a writer/director capacity. In the film world, he loves to work with his cinematographer Erica Sattler, who has worked with him on shorts and other projects and became like a sister to him in the process.
Martin, currently living in a cozy, old brownstone on the Upper East Side of Manhattan is still actively writing as well. He says his most recent outputs are in line with Immanuel Kant exploring the idea of how we perceive and are present within space and time and what it means to be in the physical world. He’s also inspired by Neil Gaiman, Terrence Malick, Alan Moore, Frederico Fellini, and Alejandro Jodorowsky for their mythicism, surrealism, and dream aesthetic while integrating honest emotions.
He asks difficult questions about the state of the universe in his writings often. While speaking with him, Travis wondered, “How do outsiders fit in the complex structure of a universe so massive? How do we shape our reality, and how does reality shape us to fit into it? What does it mean to be in the now, to be in a space and to be in the concept of time? I think a lot of people don’t think about these things because they’re so present rather than thinking beyond that.” Heady questions for such a young artist.
Travis added that he is, “…more or less a Compatibilist when it comes to free will. My version of that means everything is determined, but we cannot comprehend the scale of things to come and we may be moving the flow of things to come in our reality. But that doesn’t mean we know what will happen and shouldn’t be overjoyed at not knowing.”
He still has simple pleasures. Crying, and the few minutes after make Travis happy because it washes away unexplainable sadness and makes him feel alive and human. However, the purest joy he gets comes from riding on a pair of swings on any playground just as he did as a boy.
Post COVID-19, Travis is set to act in an Off-Off-Broadway production of The Postman Always Rings Twice at the Producer’s Club. While quarantined, he’s working on a short film he wrote and editing the sequel to Lion’s Heaven and staying in shape with daily weight training and running in order to keep his physique as sharp as his mind. His senior year may have been a smashing creative success but we think Martin will pull something just as daring, magical and original while spending time inside during the pandemic. It’s senior year all over again.
If you’d like to check out some of Travis’ favorite entertainment, here’s a comprehensive list of his recommendations for quarantine:
TV shows: Daredevil, FLCL and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia
Movies: Seven Samurai, Tree of Life, Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, and The Holy Mountain
Music: The Gorillaz, Childish Gambino, The Pillows, and Weather Report
Literature: American Gods by Neil Gaiman, Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, The Short Bus by Jonathan Mooney and Mine by Robert R. McCammon
Comics: Superman, Sandman, Monstress, and Moon Knight
Video games: Kingdom Hearts, Red Dead Redemption, Assassin’s Creed and Spec Ops: The Line
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