The Vancouver Fringe Festival is known as the place to find edgy, groundbreaking, provocative new works of theatre. But now, on its 30th anniversary, it’s taking steps to also become the place to find edgy, groundbreaking, provocative older works of theatre.

The Dramatic Works Series brings six directors from the local stage scene to mount previously published plays with two or more actors at the Cultch’s black-box Vancity Culture Lab. Shows can also surpass the Fringe’s usual 75-minute limit and last up to 120 minutes. The special program has included mentorship by veteran local thesp and Bard on the Beach star Scott Bellis.

The result is an array of work that ranges from a Macbeth that puts an electrifying new spin on his execution to the more contemporary tale of two women struggling with rape and trauma in Matei Visniec’s 1997 play The Body of a Woman as a Battlefield in the Bosnian War.

“There’s nothing wrong with one-man, self-produced, self-written work, but I do think there is a whole other niche of previously published, beautiful works,” says Elizabeth Kirkland, whose team is mounting Betty Lambert’s play The Good of the Sun, which began as a radio play in 1960 and hasn’t been staged in more than four decades. “It is providing a nice little space to bring these scripts up and to produce them at the Fringe.”

The new series offered her the chance to showcase the work of playwright Lambert, a long-time SFU English professor who died in Burnaby in 1983, leaving behind a rich collection of radio plays, dramas, short stories, and a novel.

“I feel like I want to champion her work and I feel like she writes so powerfully,” says Kirkland. “I don’t know a whole lot about the feminist movement at the time, but she was writing about subjects that were incredibly risky—about affairs and open relationships.”

The story is about a couple that heads to Mexico to try to find a cure for the much-older husband’s illness. But the wife starts to become deeply attracted to his Mexican doctor, prompting intense questions of infidelity and what it means to be a woman. Kirkland, who scoured the archives for a Canadian female playwright when she first heard the series was happening, says the role “fits me like a glove”.

Like many of the productions in the Dramatic Works Series, The Good of the Sun won’t be a straight-up rendition of the script. Director Tanille Geib has given it a Fringe twist, bringing the warmth of daytime sunshine and scents of a Mexican garden right into the theatre.

“A lovely coincidence has been that our stage manager, Ryan Caron, said, ‘Hey, scent design has always been on my bucket list,’ ” Kirkland says. “So he did a lot of research, especially on allergens and allergies, but also about scents that would have been in a Mexican garden. Then, as the play gets meatier and energized, so does the scent get sharper and less pleasant.

“It’s just another level of experience,” adds Kirkland, “and what better place to do that than at the Fringe?”

Amid all this boundary-pushing, Kirkland says, Bellis’s input at rehearsal has been invaluable. He’s nudged the company to take their work into even more “dangerous” territory. “It was almost like he gave us permission to go as far as we wanted to with this,” she says.

With Bellis’s sure eye and six troupes reviving some of their best-loved plays or treasured discoveries, the series at the Cultch promises to be a big new draw for theatre lovers at the Fringe. There’s enough here to thrill the eyes and ears—let alone those olfactory glands.

The Dramatic Works Series runs at the Cultch’s Vancity Culture Lab as part of the Vancouver Fringe Festival from Thursday (September 4) to September 14.