The story below is from our September/October 2024 issue. For more stories like it, Subscribe Today. Thank you!
The chair of Hollins University’s undergraduate theatre department uses her international experience and inclusive philosophy to create a transformative and collaborative theatre environment.
To attempt to confine Wendy-Marie Martin by any definition feels like a minimization of her work. Like a black box theatre transforms to fit any production, Martin’s trajectory as an actor, a director and a playwright has blossomed over the 30-plus year span of her career. She’s currently the chair of Hollins University’s undergraduate theatre department.
Martin, 53, is deeply interested in the impact of theatre and the work that goes on between the collaborators — the entire team involved in making the production. She says that a decade working in Germany’s theatre industry influenced her career the most.
“I didn’t understand the theater they were making at first because it was so different from anything that I’d made [in the U.S.],” she says. In Germany, Martin learned that an audience could enjoy a production without a clear-cut good-guy bad-guy storyline and leave asking difficult questions.
Martin’s work became more experimental, more abstract. Now, she invites conversation to the stage — collaboration between the actors, crew and community. One of her more recent plays, “To Be a Starfish,” asks audiences to collaborate on the specifics of a scene regarding oppression prior to the performance – the audience decides on the form of oppression.
“The purpose of the scene is the conversation around it,” Martin says.
That play challenges people to stare oppression’s cyclical nature in the eye. The structure of the work shows that nothing changes, and the deafening questions that result from that structure confront the audience. American audiences aren’t into being challenged in that way, Martin says. Her work receives a better response outside the U.S. — Martin’s plays have been produced in a dozen other countries.
Martin accepted her position at Hollins in 2021. Since then, she has been busy bringing opportunities to the stage for all the students involved in the university’s theatre program.
“We started to shape the program around … creating holistic theatre makers, socially conscious theatre makers who thought about what the stories that we put on stage are saying to their audience and about themselves,” Martin says.
Students wanted to write their own stories. “Our department is proudly queer, proudly trans, non-binary. And also, we have students of color. They couldn’t find scripts with their identities,” she says. The theatre began producing students’ original work to support their visions.
Under Martin’s leadership, the department has also encouraged students to reach into the community. “Theater can have a tendency to play to people’s egos. It’s very self-focused,” Martin says.
She’s working to encourage her students to shift their focus from themselves while also teaching transferable skills that relate to the curriculum and works to advance accessibility, inclusivity and social justice in performance.
Two of Martin’s students interviewed members of Roanoke’s LGBTQIA2S+ community to create a verbatim theatre piece that will document that community’s story. “There’s a whole community of people in Roanoke that have so much knowledge that our students could benefit from,” she says.
Students have also participated in service projects for the Boys & Girls Clubs of Southwest Virginia and Ursula’s Cafe.
Martin moved to Roanoke in 2021 after she accepted her position at Hollins, but she’s been here before. She earned her M.F.A. in Playwriting from Hollins in 2014 and after directing several plays at Mill Mountain Theatre.
Martin has planted herself in the community since then, joining the Ursula’s Cafe board when that non-profit cafe first opened. The downtown Roanoke donate-what-you-can restaurant’s mission is to address food scarcity. “It gives some folks in our unhoused community a [chance] to have a full experience of being respected and being welcomed,” Martin says.
Respect. Service. Community. Connection. Staring hard questions in the eye. That’s Wendy-Marie. She says feminism is all about being radically inclusive and equitable; it’s about giving everyone a chance to be part of the conversation. That’s a pretty fair way of defining her as well.
The story above is from our September/October 2024 issue. For more stories like it, Subscribe Today. Thank you!
