Amanda Mansfield plays Elizabeth in "I Live To Tell."

Hollins Festival Off With A Bang

Sarah Cosgrove's "I Live To Tell" is the Hollins-Mill Mountain Theatre Festival of New Works in a nutshell. It is a 30-minute, one-woman play, written by Ms. Cosgrove, a Hollins MFA, and featuring 15 people in various roles from director John Bergman to dramaturg Gwyneth Strope. All of them have a link to the Hollins MFA program.

The Festival of New Works--performed in the summer and winter at Hollins and MMT--is a showcase of the Hollins masters in playwrighting program and has been instrumental over the years in helping develop Roanoke's deep bench of theater arts practitioners.

"I Live To Tell" features Amanda Mansfield in the lead role as a woman who has to undergo a radical mastectomy and it jams a great deal of intense theatrical expertise into its half an hour. Ms. Mansfield is the matriarch of Roanoke's First Family of Theatre (husband Mike Mansfield and daughter Ms. Strope) and is often considered Roanoke's most accomplished actress. She and her daughter are MFA students at Hollins, both on scholarship.

"I Live To Tell" is one of three Hollins-developed (and still developing) plays over the next two weekends. It continues today (7:30 p.m.) and tomorrow (2 p.m.) at the Hollins Theatre. Next weekend will feature "The Dragon Butcher" and "Grave Mistakes." Tickets are $10 for each session. You can find more information on the plays and the festival at https://www.hollins.edu/events/