Hollins 2025 Events
Winter 2025 Festival of New Works Events through our partnership with the Hollins Playwright’s Lab
For more than four decades, Mill Mountain Theatre has had the development of new plays as part of our core mission. We 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 our 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.
We invite you to take advantage of this unique opportunity to share in these events. A complete listing can be found on the Playwright’s Lab Facebook Event Page: https://www.facebook.com/hollinsplaywrights/events.
Synopses of the festival productions are below. All events take place at Hollins University Theatre (8004 Hill House Ct, Roanoke, VA 24020). Due to limited seating, we recommend advance ticketing. Tickets available online at https://our.show/winterfestival25
FRIEDA | January 16-18 at 7:30 pm & January 19 at 2 pm
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.
NUPTIAL MASS | January 23-25 at 7:30 pm & January 26 at 2 pm
Written by Ben Abbott. Directed by David Veatch.
Jeff has been looking forward to getting married his whole life. But when his fiancee doesn’t show up at the church on the morning of the wedding, he scrambles to figure out where she is and why. What will it take for the wedding to go forward as planned? Is he prepared for the secrets that will come to light as he tries?
Content warning: Nuptial Mass contains queer themes, religious themes, and simulated, comical drug use.
Hollins/Mill Mountain Theatre Partnership
A Dynamic Academic/Professional Partnership
Mill Mountain Theatre has a longstanding relationship with Hollins University, and the Hollins Theatre Institute. Among the exciting collaborations currently on the boards are:
Hollins-Mill Mountain Winter Festival of New Works. Each year new works from HTI are given world-premiere and workshop productions on MMT’s professional stages, fulfilling Roanoke’s long-standing enthusiasm and support for the development of new works.
M.F.A. Playwright’s Lab summer residency at MMT. For six weeks every summer, the M.F.A. program in playwriting (also known as Playwright’s Lab) splits its time between the Hollins campus and MMT’s various stages, hosting guest speakers of national renown, the annual Summer Festival of Play Readings, and Overnight Sensations, a micro-brewed new play festival of freshly baked plays.
Faculty and guest artists. Working professional artists from MMT serve as adjunct faculty and guest artists at the Hollins Theatre Institute throughout the year.
Musical Theatre training at Hollins is directly connected to the excellent artistic staff at MMT, with professional artists providing classroom instruction at Hollins and at MMT. Audition and performance opportunities are available, and performance internships give Hollins students the chance to work with professional performers while earning academic credit.
Undergraduate Internships. Hollins students have the opportunity to complete internships throughout the year, while obtaining academic credit.
Post-graduate apprenticeships. Upon graduation, Hollins students can apply for a paid professional apprenticeship at MMT, allowing them to begin their careers in the city where they trained.
The CenterPieces Reading Series is a showcase for minimally produced staged readings that happen over the lunch hour on the Waldron Stage of Mill Mountain Theatre on the 2nd Wednesday of every month. Grab some friends, bring a lunch, see a play!
