Circus not coming to town; former clown ‘stunned’

Reed Martin nearly tripped over himself at news of Ringling demise|

“I couldn’t believe it! I was stunned,” says Sonoma actor and author – and former circus clown – Reed Martin, after hearing the news last week that Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus will be shutting down permanently later this year.

“At first, I thought it was a joke,” he says. “I was online with one of my former clown colleagues, and the guy wrote, ‘This is fake news, right?’ But it wasn’t. The circus really is closing up shop.”

Best known for his ongoing work with the Reduced Shakespeare Company – a literate comedy troupe that has made good use of his professional clowning skills and pratfall sensibilities – Martin’s two-year stint as a Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey clown, in 1988 and 1989, is one he marks now as incredibly memorable and instrumental. During that time, Martin also functioned as the troupe’s understudy Ringmaster, occasionally donning the iconic top hat and tailcoat to welcome “children of all ages” to the show. That was almost 30 years ago. Still, Martin admits that the news of his former gig’s impending demise came as a powerful shock.

“I guess I always thought the Ringling Bros. Circus would never die,” he says. “It’s always been ‘death, taxes and Ringling,’ you know? It still seems so surreal to me, and now that the shock is wearing off, the sadness is beginning to set in.”

The Illinois-based Feld Entertainment company – which has owned the 146-year-old circus since 1967 – cites rising operating costs and declining ticket sales as the reasons for shutting down the famous traveling show. Having retired its entire elephant population two years ago, the company says audiences have been drifting to alternative Cirque du Soleil-style entertainment. Traditional circuses – known for their animal acts, high-flying trapeze artists and small armies of brightly-painted clowns – have been trending away from the massive popularity they once enjoyed. Because of this, on Jan. 16, CEO Kenneth Feld announced that after May, the Ringling Bros. and Barnum and Bailey Circus would finally relinquish its claim to being “the greatest show on Earth.”

Ironically, less than a week before that announcement was made, the company installed its first-ever female ringmaster, Kristen Michelle Wilson. The gig, touted as a game-changer, will now be much shorter than Wilson – and those longtime advocates for improved gender parity in the circus – had hoped. Along with her, an estimated 300 employees will lose their jobs by June of this year. As for the animals, only some of which the circus owns - lion trainers tending to own the animals they work with - Feld says most will be found appropriate homes in sanctuaries and refuges, with some likely to end up in qualified zoos and other conservation-based animal facilities.

Animal rights activists, not surprisingly, have applauded the news of the circus’s closure.

“I’ve always been conflicted, myself, about the use of some of those animals,” says Martin, who nevertheless says he became quite comfortable in close proximity to lions and tigers and elephants.

“Still,” he adds, “the names of Ringling Brothers and P.T. Barnum are so iconic. It’s just kind of hard to fathom that everything those names have stood for, for good or bad, is about to end.”

Martin says he’s grateful he took his family to see the Ringling Bros. show when it played in the Bay Area last year.

“It’s not scheduled to come back to the West Coast again before it shuts down for good,” Martin muses. “So I got to see the circus one last time, even if I didn’t know it was the last time … at the time.”

During his time as a working circus clown, Marin visited over 50 cities, performing to hundreds of thousands of people, picking up a lifetime of memories along the way. That said, Martin admits he never intended to become a circus clown.

“When I went to the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Clown College in 1987,” he says, “I’d been through eight years of University and had three degrees. I wanted to become an actor. But I was living in New York, and had a lot of admiration for certain performers I knew of, people who’d gone the trained-clown route. So I enrolled in Clown College, thinking it would help me as an actor, maybe teach me more about how to be funny physically, instead of just being funny verbally.”

At the end of his training, Martin was offered a job with the red unit, and ended up joining the “King Tusk” tour – for $180 a week. The circus, of course, travels by train, a full mile of rolling cars transporting everything from circus equipment and trained animals to the cast and crew themselves, who usually live and sleep right there on the train.

“It was, as they say, a very big adventure,” laughs Martin.

After a year, he was offered a $20 a week raise.

“So I stayed for another year,” he says, “traveling to a different city every few days, living on the train, working hard as a clown. And don’t let anyone tell you being a clown isn’t hard work. The clowns are the first to enter the ring and the last to leave. We worked our butts off.”

The circus was hard, but worth it, Martin believes.

“True, when you’re working, it doesn’t feel all that magical,” he says. “But sometimes you look up and see the faces of the kids and their parents, and you realize just what a special thing it is, to be a part of something that really has been so magical to so many. It was a privilege to be a part of it, and I know that other circuses still exist – but I really am kind of sad that this particular circus will soon be gone forever.”

Email David at david.templeton@sonomanews.com.

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