It may be a bit disorienting for audiences to see Megan Follows, an actor indelibly etched in the public’s mind as a teenager, playing a character in middle age.

Follows is known internationally for her portrayal of Anne Shirley in the Anne of Green Gables miniseries and its sequels, which are among Canada’s all-time most successful television productions. But the awkwardness of growing older is at the heart of This, which opens at the Playhouse next Thursday (January 13) with Follows making her Vancouver stage debut as the central character, Jane.

This focuses on a quartet of old college friends whose midlife has snuck up on them, an experience Follows can relate to. “I think you arrive and you don’t know how you got there,” she offers, on a lunch break from rehearsal at the Playhouse’s production office. It’s common for people in her line of work to “feel forever young, because we get to play,” she says, “so you forget that you’re actually getting older; you’re not as aware of it.

“Having said that,” she continues, “I have children, and my eldest has just gone off to college, first year, and so those are huge markers of change and transition.”

Transition is central to This, written by Melissa James Gibson, a former Vancouverite now based in New York City. It’s nearly a year since Jane’s husband died; her friends Marrell and Tom have just had their first baby; and their friend, Alan, a single gay man, struggles to find meaning in both his career and his emotional life. The play opens with a dinner party to which Marrell has invited Jean-Pierre, a French doctor, as a possible romantic interest for Jane. An after-dinner game leads to misunderstandings and impulsive choices that threaten to unravel the group’s relationships.

“People collide and affect one another,” Follows observes, “but the reasons that they’re colliding are not the same.” Follows characterizes the group of old friends as “a bunch of people floundering and almost drowning in their subjectivity”. Their intense self-focus is balanced by the presence of Jean-Pierre, whose work with Doctors Without Borders gives him perspective on the others’ personal problems.

In addition to its emotional complexity, one of the great pleasures of Gibson’s script is its attentiveness to language. Gibson sat in on two days of rehearsals early in the process, an experience that Follows, whose recent theatre work includes Anton Chekhov and Henrik Ibsen, found remarkable. “I have not been very often in the room with a living playwright,” she says. “Knowing that everything that was coming out of your mouth actually began in the head of the woman sitting behind the table was quite extraordinary.”

The desire to honour an author’s words also informed Follows’s most famous role, that of Anne Shirley. “You didn’t want to let that author [Lucy Maud Montgomery] down,” she states. “And I don’t think we did. So I’m very proud of what was accomplished in that.”

Twenty-five years later, Follows feels no need to distance herself from the role, and her deep connection to the character is evident in her response to my description of Anne as a plucky, optimistic orphan girl: “I think that it’s easy to generalize what we think Anne is. And I think she was a whole lot more complex than that. And I think that was the beauty of the character—that she wasn’t actually plucky. She was an extraordinary survivor. And she had certain elements to her that if she did not have them, she wouldn’t have survived.”

Follows also appreciates the feminism inherent in Anne. “You had a female character who drove a story line from beginning, middle, to end who was not defined by any males in that piece,” she says. “It doesn’t mean she didn’t love them”¦.But she was not the appendage to the male story. I felt incredibly lucky as a young woman that I got to play that, where—excuse my French—it didn’t matter about the size of my tits. What mattered was how do you embody someone who still wants to say yes to life when the forces around her are saying no, no, no, and doesn’t do it by selling herself out? It’s a fascinating role model; we don’t have too many of them as women. There are many more for boys and for men.

“And so if I carry some of that, and I’m identified with that, I’m okay with that.”

Now that Follows is working more in theatre, what are some of her dream roles? “I love Blanche [in Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire],” says the actor, who divides her time between Los Angeles and Toronto. “I find her fascinating. I’ve never played her and I would love to play her. Having done Nora in A Doll’s House, I would be intrigued by Hedda Gabler.

“What is so wonderful about the theatre,” she adds, “is that there is that acknowledgment that with age, you develop your craft, so you get the rewards, which are incredible roles.”

This runs at the Vancouver Playhouse next Thursday (January 13) to January 29.