We’re very excited for the talkback after this Sunday’s performance of Time Stands Still: the Tampa Bay Times’ Susan Taylor Martin and Ben Montgomery join the artists to talk about a myriad of topics generated by the play including ethics in journalism and covering crisis.
Donald Margulies says though this is first and foremost a story about relationships that this play “questions, among many other things, how we represent and digest unimaginable events, whether in photography, in writing, or in popular culture.” All four characters in the play touch on these questions at some point, from four very unique perspectives.
Senior Correspondent Susan Taylor Martin served as the paper’s senior foreign correspondent from 1997 to 2011. During that time, she covered the wars in Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan and once had to don a burqa to escape from an anti-American mob in Pakistan shortly after the 9/11 attacks. She also has traveled extensively in, and reported from, Israel, Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and other countries in the Middle East. In her three decades with the Times, Martin has held a variety of senior management positions and is currently covering real estate and development. She is a native of New York City and graduate of Duke University.
Ben Montgomery is an enterprise reporter for the Tampa Bay Times and founder of the narrative journalism website Gangrey.com. Montgomery grew up in Oklahoma and studied journalism at Arkansas Tech University, where he played defensive back for the football team, the Wonder Boys. He worked for the Courier in Russellville, Ark., the Standard-Times in San Angelo, Texas, the Times Herald-Record in New York’s Hudson River Valley and the Tampa Tribune before joining the Times in 2006. In 2010, he was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in local reporting and won the Dart Award and Casey Medal for a series called “For Their Own Good,” about abuse at Florida’s oldest reform school. He lives in Tampa with his wife, Jennifer, and three children.
