Writer

Beginning with his first full-length play, written while still a senior in high school and selected for a New York young artists theatre festival, Jonathan Marten has put his pen to stage plays, screenplays, song lyrics, web content, print journalism and advertising for more than 40 years.
Jonathan’s romantic comedy, The Birds Do It, received an Off Off Broadway production in 1978. Jonathan also served as Editor-In-Chief of Onstage Magazine, an arts & entertainment monthly in Hampton Roads, Virginia, for six years. While there, he had the opportunity to interview luminaries of stage and screen (Rita Moreno, Craig Wasson, David Ogden Stiers), classic rock (Papa John Phillips, The Turtles, The Monkeys) reviewed plays and film, and wrote a regular news and opinion column. During this period, Jonathan also free-lanced, writing commercial copy, for print and radio advertising. Among the clients he wrote for are the Omni Hotel and Brandy Nan Comedy Club.  In 1998-99, Jonathan provided web content for a website entitled We the Shoppers.com. A character he created for the site, Aunt Ethel, was featured on the ABC network show Good Morning America, utilizing a script written by Jonathan.
Jonathan has written a number of short-subject screenplays, including the erotic fantasy, The Line Between, which he also directed. The Line Between was selected for screening by the 2006 NY Cinekink Film Festival, as well as the 2008 Chashama Film Festival in NYC. Jonathan’s also been publishing his personal blog, The World According To Yoni (Jonny in Hebrew), since November, 2017.
Jonathan’s current writing project (co-written with his friend, playwright Joe Doyle, and his wife, Tanya Marten), is a screenplay entitled, The Reel Life. A satirical comedy about the insanity within an indie motion picture production company run by two maniacal brothers, Nathan and Norman Goldstein, The Reel Life is being produced by Soular Films in association with Wave4M Studios. Principal photography is set to begin in March, 2021.
Writing Samples
A few samples from the screenplay for The Reel Life, created by me, and written with Joe Doyle, my wife, Tanya, and I.	Various clippings from my years as writer and Editor-In-Chief of Onstage Magazine, including a stage review, column and feature article. All these were solely written by me.
This is a cute piece of fluff entitled Five Minutes With Betty & Veronica. This was co-written with my wife, Tanya, for a short subject film we still haven’t made. We like it, so, hopefully, we’ll get around to shooting it one of these days.	Another short subject film, Air Broadway was co-written with Director/Writer Claude Kerven (formerly of SNL). It was commissioned by Showtime for a series of shorts which, much to our chagrin, they never got around to shooting.
The Birds Do It, a romantic comedy, was my very first play to receive a New York production. I began writing it while still in college, finishing it on the road, a year or so after. I think my early influences are fairly self-evident, but just in case, they were mostly Neil Simon, with a little Woody Allen thrown in for good measure.	An early work, I wrote Annoyed With Freud while I was still at Emerson College, where it was first performed. I didn’t even know I still had a copy until my wife magically handed me a disk containing a bunch of my earliest efforts. I include it here as my own personal trip down memory lane.