Keeping Up with Andrea Martin
If, while reading a script, you encounter dialogue that runs “What, you take ONLY ONE BITE? THIS IS NOT A BIG DESSERT,” it would not be eccentric to imagine the words being spoken by Andrea Martin. From “SCTV” to “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” and “Pippin,” Martin has played characters whose proverbial control panel is reminiscent of a Japanese toilet’s: every button means “celebration.”
Martin was sitting in the lobby of the Signature Theatre the other day, awaiting a rehearsal for “Meet the Cartozians,” the play that features the dialogue above. A witty period drama that morphs into a contemporary satire, the show, written by Talene Monahon and presented by Second Stage, centers on an actual 1925 federal court case about whether an Armenian American man named Tatos Cartozian should be considered white. Martin, whose own roots are Armenian, first plays Cartozian’s dessert-dispensing mother, then a contemporary Angeleno who is asked to don ethnic garb in a reality-TV show about a Cartozian descendant who is highly reminiscent of Kim Kardashian.
“It’s a lot,” the petite seventy-eight-year-old, dressed in a hot-pink sweater and jeans, said of the gig. “It’s two centuries, I’m two characters, and I speak Armenian in it.”
Although most people think that Martin is Canadian, she grew up in Portland, Maine, and didn’t move to Canada until she was twenty-three. Her paternal grandfather, who escaped the Armenian genocide of 1915, changed the family name from Papazian to Martin. Nevertheless, Martin wrote in her 2014 memoir, “to compensate for my ethnic insecurities, I found a hobby that allowed me to be anything I wanted to be.” It wasn’t drugs or schizophrenia.
Martin’s childhood bedroom was next to that of her maternal grandmother, who’d been sent to the United States from Armenia at fifteen for an arranged marriage to a man twice her age. Before Martin visited Armenia in 1991, to do research for a one-woman show, she knew little about the country other than how to make a sweet bread called gatah. Armenia’s location—in Asia, sharing a border with Iran—has long fostered confusion: Are Armenians European? Asian? Middle Eastern? Martin was galvanized by the trip, and she developed a respect for her ancestral homeland. “As I was flying back to the States, it was announced that Gorbachev had been kidnapped,” she said. “Which meant that Armenia was no longer a republic.”
Over the years, Martin has distinguished herself from other sketch-comedy pros by taking on dramatic roles—like the nun she recently played in the horror series “Evil”—and also by the longevity of her career. Martin Short, who met Martin when they were in a 1972 Toronto production of “Godspell” together (“I think she brought gatah to the theatre”), credits her success to perfectionism and versatility. “In Canada in the seventies, there was no star system,” he said. “You just worked. You didn’t say to your manager, ‘Is this good for my résumé?’ You said, ‘Do I bring a suit?’ So now Andrea is one of the most Tony-nominated actresses in the history of Broadway. And she has her Emmys.” (Martin won two as a writer for “SCTV.”)
A long career, of course, has its share of awkward working situations. In 2022, for instance, Martin, who has been divorced since 2004, had to make out with her old chum Steve Martin on the streets of New York. (She was playing his love interest on “Only Murders in the Building.”) “Yeah, that was something!” Martin said, her chocolaty eyes popping slightly. “I was thrilled.” She went on, “Steve’s married, so he’s probably kissing his wife every day. I was, like, Wait, what was the last time for me—the eighties? I was very grateful. And there was no intimacy coördinator. We coördinated our own kissing.”
She was circumspect about whether her illustrious TV-comedy colleagues would be coming to see “Meet the Cartozians.” “I don’t want the kids in the show to know,” she said. “It’ll make everyone nervous.”
Short said that he would be there on opening night. “But, believe me, I don’t think I’m the problem,” he said. “Meryl Streep would be the problem.” 
