SELF PORTRAIT

Ken-Matt Martin

■ PLACE OF BIRTH: Oct. 27, Little Rock

■ FAVORITE COLORS: Crimson and cream. They’re the colors of my for-charity camp fraternity, Kappa Alpha Psi, a historically black fraternity, and my favorite color as a kid always was red anyway.

■ MENU FOR MY LAST MEAL: Oh my goodness, what a question! I don’t know — seafood. Lobster something … I love potatoes, but I don’t eat them as much — all that starch — but, like, any kind of potato.

■ FAVORITE SHOW I EVER SAW AT THE REP: That’s a hard question. “Dreamgirls”? Oh my God, that was incredible. It was so good. It was the first musical ever that I saw, like, live in person. I’d seen things elsewhere, but, like, on video and stuff. And I remember, I saw it on closing night. The show was so freaking good. My father took me; the entire audience was on their feet before the end of the number except me and my dad, because I was like paralyzed … I literally could not move, and my dad was … kind of following my lead.

■ FAVORITE SHOW YOU’VE EVER DIRECTED: “The Piano Lesson.” It’s a special show. I got to direct it in Des Moines [Iowa] last year and it was the highest grossing show in Pyramid’s history. If I could do it again, I’d do it in a heartbeat.

■ GUESTS AT MY FANTASY DINNER PARTY: James Baldwin. Toni Morrison. Can you imagine Toni Morrison and James Baldwin together? Only because she passed recently and I got to … meet her once in passing and I just wish it could be Chita Rivera. You know what — I’ve also had a chance to meet her because I worked on ‘Warpaint’ at the Goodman [in Chicago] … Patti LuPone. And God rest his soul, because I really looked up to him — I never got a chance to meet him and I regret this, but Hal Prince; like me, he’s been both a director and producer. Yeah. And [playwright] Lorraine Hansberry.

■ IF I’VE LEARNED ONE THING IN LIFE, IT’S: If you can find a way to extend patience and grace to every single human that you meet you might just be lucky enough that people extend it back to you. And I truly believe that when we can find grace and be patient with one another, because life is hard and we’re all just figuring it out, we can be better community members, better family members, better friends.

■ THE CELEBRITY I MOST RESEMBLE: This is easy because I get it all the time: [actor-comedian] Kevin Hart. I don’t know if that’s true as much anymore, but when I was in my 20s and a little bit thinner and skinnier, I was an admission counselor for Drake University and so I used to work college fairs all over the country, and it was during the period of time when he was first kind of rising, you know, like 2011-14. And young people used to come and try to sneak pictures of me: ‘What’s up Kevin Hart?’”

■ ONE WORD TO SUM ME UP: Determined