By Melissa Fryer

The New Waves play festival is designed to help emerging playwrights develop new work.

“Doing new plays is a major part of our mandate,” said Frank Moher, artistic director of Western Edge Theatre, which is hosting the festival. “Grown-up theatre companies do new plays.”

During the next two weeks, the festival features staged readings of never-before heard plays, a full production of a new play by Mark Stubbings, and a question-and-answer session with Stubbings and Moher.

Presenting new work is the riskiest of theatre ventures – no one knows how the audience will react – and the most exciting, said Moher.

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A Nanaimo actress landed a “plum role” in the classic retelling of a time-honoured play.

Lorna McLellan plays Amanda Wingfield in Western Edge Theatre’s production of The Glass Menagerie, a play by Tennessee Williams.

“The pictures he draws with the words the characters say is just poetry,” McLellan said. “I read it for years and years.”

McLellan said she used Williams’s words to get inside her character’s head. Amanda is a fading southern belle, tasked with raising two children on her own in Depression-era St. Louis.

McLellan said Amanda’s pride and her vision of the world harkens back to her earlier, more comfortable life in the American south.

“It doesn’t fit with the world she’s living in,” McLellan said.

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Mark Leiren-Young’s earliest memory of environmental issues involved the Ogopogo.

While a teenager, he found an article in his community newspaper about how the local government would spray the pesticide 2,4-D in Okanagan Lake to kill milfoil.

He worried about the health of the region’s legendary, but elusive, prehistoric creature, so he created a science project and interviewed members of a high-profile environmental watchdog.

“This upset me to no end at 13,” he said. “That’s my first memory of doing something environmental.”

The journalist, author and filmmaker found himself immersed in environmental issues in his professional career. While writing and researching his film The Green Chain, about forestry issues in B.C., he came across themes, ideas and quirks in environmental politics that didn’t fit the film but he had to share just the same.

He developed Greener Than Thou, a one-man theatre show directed by TJ Dawe, which touches on some of the environmental issues no one wants to discuss.

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"The new Victoria arts study is a credible one. It was carried out by Brock Smith of the University of Victoria's business school. More than 500 people at performing arts events were interviewed. Almost 100 artists, arts-related businesses and arts/culture organizations were quizzed as well.