Gays and the military: in Sons of Ulster a gay lad finds love in the trenches of World War I. The play's director, Nicholas Martin, talks about balancing tragedy with good Irish humor. (theater).

"I've been accused in productions of leaning a little heavily on the humor in the plays," admits stage director Nicholas Martin cheerfully. "After I did a production of The Royal Family, my pal Campbell Scott said, `Your plays always start with one big joke and end with someone dying.' I never thought about it like that, but that's almost a definition of what I think life is."

After a 30-year stint as a journeyman actor and another spell as a teacher, Martin has found his true vocation in the past decade as a theater director. He's had a string of successful productions that includes works by Tennessee Williams, Arthur Laurents, Albert Innaurato, Christopher Durang, Jon Robin Baitz, and others. His breakthrough show--Jonathan Marc Sherman's Sophistry at New York's Playwrights Horizons in 1993--helped launch the careers of a number of relative newcomers who have since made their names in film and television: Ethan Hawke, Calista Flockhart, Steve Zahn, and Anthony Rapp.

Sophistry also established Martin's reputation for having excellent rapport with young actors. He gave Party of Five's Scott Wolf his first professional stage role--in the Williamstown, Mass., production of Dead End--and while teaching at Vermont's Bennington College set Justin Theroux (The Broken Hearts Club) on his path as an actor.

Wolf and Theroux are both part of the cast of Martin's latest, a World War I play by Tony-nominated Irish playwright Frank McGuinness that luxuriates in the lengthy title Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme. The show opens February 24 at Lincoln Center's Mitzi Newhouse Theater in New York, after acclaimed runs in Williamstown and at Boston's Huntington Theatre--productions that also featured Wolf and Theroux. "I have a real paternal relationship with these guys," Martin says.

Sons of Ulster tells the story of a platoon of Northern Irish lads who volunteer to fight in one of the bloodiest battles of the First World War. "It takes this monumental tragedy and gives you the smallest canvas of it: the most intimate lives of these seven young men," Martin explains. "How they learn to bond and how they go to their deaths is incredibly moving and important." He pauses, then adds, "Also, I should say, it is an Irish play, which means there is humor."

In his three decades as an actor, Martin says he never achieved anything like the status he now has as a director. "I was funny but not really good enough. Also, I was a little too gay for mass media," he says. A member of the second company of the landmark The Boys in the Band, Martin reports that he was always out as an actor: "I sort of miss the great gay market as an actor. There was a kind of freedom to be gay, especially in the '70s."

Today, Martin says, straight actors are drawn to gay parts because "they recognize that frequently the gay part is the most interesting." The character Theroux plays in Sons of Ulster, for example, is gay and is the most complicated of the young men in the story. "He joins the army because he wants to die in the war," Martin explains, "and then meets a young blacksmith and falls in love and has a reason to live."

Martin himself is single now but likes to think the full life he has lived informs his work as a director. "I can't put it into cooking anymore, and I can't put it into kissing anymore, but you can see it onstage at the Mitzi Newhouse Theater," he says with a hearty laugh.

Raymond writes on theater and film and lives in New York City.