Winter 2025 Festival of New Works Events through our partnership with Mill Mountain Theatre
For more than four decades, Mill Mountain Theatre has had the development of new plays as part of their core mission. They have been home to a prominent national playwriting contest, premieres of new plays on both the Trinkle and Waldron stages, the Norfolk Southern Festival of New Works, CenterPieces and their ongoing partnership with the Playwright’s Lab at Hollins University has helped Roanoke gain an international reputation as an artistic home for new work since that program launched in 2007. Each year, Hollins brings dozens of professional theatre artists from all over the globe to our city as faculty, guest speakers and visiting artists mounting productions.
This year, the Winter Festival of New Works features two plays, please read below to learn more about these shows.
Frieda
Written by ArLynn Parker. Directed by Vanna Richardson.
"The family I'd been tricked into choosing was never going to accept me."
This one-act play revolves around a young woman wandering through a near-lifeless forest she wants to escape. As she speculates directly to the audience about what brought her to this place, she reveals herself to be the stepmother to a pair of challenging children. The expectations of what she imagined her life to be and what she was saddled with collide as she recounts her story. Taking place in the woods in which she lost her way, details of her childhood, loveless marriage, and the desperate hunger that drove her to make the most important decision of her life become clear. Ultimately wrestling with questions of what it means to be a "chosen family," she attempts to set the record straight.
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