Blyth Festival 2025: Martin comes to Blyth for the first time
BY SHAWN LOUGHLIN
This season will be Flávia Martin’s first with the Blyth Festival when she assumes the role of stage manager for Emma Donoghue’s The Wind Coming Over The Sea and she already feels at home.
Martin is a Toronto-based theatre professional who has worked extensively with Toronto’s Aluna Theatre, where she is the studio co-ordinator, as well as Theatre Passe Muraille, with its rich history intertwined with the Blyth Festival through familiar names like Paul Thompson, David Fox, Miles Potter and more.
And while she has amassed a tremendous amount of experience over a relatively short career, she says she has always been drawn to the world of drama, but didn’t necessarily know that she’d end up behind the scenes, answering a question about whether she had always envisioned a career in theatre with a firm, “yes and no” answer.
Martin said she took drama classes in high school, which is where she fell in love with theatre. Describing herself as a very shy teenager at that time, she found she blended into the crowd for the first time among her fellow theatre students.
From there, she went to Oakville’s Sheridan College and began to feel that stage management was the right fit for her. While she had begun to move away from the performing aspect of theatre, she loved being in the rehearsal hall - her favourite place to be - she being a stage manager provided her an opportunity to have her cake and eat it too.
She graduated and got her first job as a stage manager out in the real world right before the COVID-19 pandemic hit, which shut down the theatre world especially for several years. However, Martin found the pandemic to be a sort of blessing in disguise for her career. She began taking jobs with Aluna Theatre and Modern Times as they were allowed and became available, but, as other stage managers in the theatre world began to move on during the pandemic, finding other jobs or exploring different disciplines, she found more work coming her way.
Since she broke into the world of stage management, Martin says she has been blessed to work with some very talented, generous and gracious people, which has made all the difference. How she made her way to Blyth was through Sandy Plunkett, who has many stage management credits to her name at the Blyth Festival. From there, one thing led to another and Martin was coming to Huron County to work for the first time.
As for the show itself, Martin said it has been fun to get to know it and to work with the cast, playwright Emma Donoghue and director Gil Garratt. She said the story is so very sad, but there is hope within it, especially when it comes to telling the tales of immigration, something to which she is no stranger.
Martin emigrated from Portugal about 20 years ago with her parents. When she was first breaking into the world of theatre - first as an actor - she faced concerns about her accent and direction to “sound more Canadian” when she delivered her lines. Conversations like those, she said, led to her questioning her identity and her place in the world of Canadian theatre. A story about the Irish immigrants of over a century ago, she said, is remarkably prescient in today’s world as fear is stoked about immigrants by right-wing politicians and their supporters.
She hopes that The Wind Coming Over The Sea will lead to some conversations surrounding that and, perhaps, a better understanding of the role immigration plays in Canada, its importance and the universal nature of the story - whether it be immigrants from 150 years ago or the immigrants of today.