Charenton's Lindsey Martin makes waves in improv, 'Wendy'
A Chitimacha tribal member and native of Charenton, Lindsey Martin now lives in New York, works in Manhattan, and does improvisational comedy at night… when she’s not also recording voiceover tracks for the upcoming movie, “Wendy,” that is.
The youngest daughter of Terry and Rebecca Marin, she went to the Chitimacha Tribal School and then to Hanson Memorial High School before moving to New Orleans.
Of her career choice, she said, “I’ve always loved comedy. I grew up watching SNL (Saturday Night Live), with my family. Yeah, I always wanted to do comedy.
“I did some improv, and I did some writing at a theatre in New Orleans, called The New Movement, and then once I got to New York, I went through the courses at the Upright Citizens Brigade, which Amy Poehler started, and I’m on an all-female team now, and we have a lovely show called: Tampons, Tears, and Triumphs.”
Martin described the show as consisting of seven women who host female comedians who “tell their stories which we’ve never heard before, and then we improvise scenes off of them.”
She said the team has been together for a year, or so, with one member who is a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union, two others are moms, with one having just become so last year, and Martin is the hiring manager at the Rockefeller Center location of Anthropologie.
She said that the team has tried to stay local for the time being; but now that babies are getting older, she expects that TT&T will begin looking to perform at festivals outside of New York City.
As for recording a voiceover part for “Wendy,” set for release on Feb. 28, Martin said she was at a bar in the East Village called Bar None, where a woman with whom she used to work in New Orleans was a part of the Bar None Facebook group, and had posted an advertisement for talent needed for an upcoming movie. The woman asked if Martin was interested. Martin assented, so the woman gave Martin’s contact information to the film producers, and they reached out to her.
She said she auditioned over FaceTime, (an iPhone app) and that she didn’t hear anything from them for five months.
Then, she got a call from a producer named Michael who asked to send her to record the part of “Older Wendy,” five days later.
Five days later, he texted her at noon, asking, “Can you be in Harold Square by five (o’clock p.m.) to do the recording?”
Martin said, yes.
That was last June, and she won’t even know how much of her voiceover work was used in the film until she sees it on the big screen.
“I’ve been reading all of the reviews to see if the storyline is the same,” she said.
Considered again her experience in the studio, she mused, “I was there for about three hours. We were in a recording studio in Midtown, and there was a screen playing the film that I would be recording over, and it was he (Michael) and I in a recording booth for about three hours, recording different scenes and doing a lot of different script reads, and he would edit-in-the-moment and give me a lot of direction.
“I had never done any voiceover work, and it was a really small space, and at one point I had to scream at the top of my lungs, for the scene in the film where she (Wendy) is chasing after the train. And so, that was really awkward, being in such a confined space for that.”
Martin said she has been in New York for four years and is happy there, doing what she loves to do, and is looking to do more in Comedy and Acting.
She also said the pizza is good.
TT&T has a monthly show at Improv Asylum, a comedy club at 307 W 26th St., New York, NY, and their next show will be on Feb. 13, featuring a “Galentine’s Day” theme.
To learn more about TT&T, and when to catch upcoming performances, go to: https://www.improvasylum.com/shows/tampons-tears-triumphs/ or call 212-203-5435.