Lee Lewis is determined to give local voices a home, writes Louise Rugendyke.
While most of Sydney's major theatre companies have staged a change of guard for 2016, Lee Lewis is digging in at Griffin Theatre Company and is determined to keep her audiences guessing. 
As Bell Shakespeare, Belvoir and the Ensemble welcome new artistic directors and Andrew Upton prepares his swansong season at the Sydney Theatre Company, Lewis has just programmed her third season at Griffin since taking over from Sam Strong in 2013.
She said there would be plenty to surprise next year, so "there's always that feeling you don't know where your night is going to go".
"I think about it like Olympic downhill skiing, like the super-G, where they put those flags a long way apart," she said. "I just really want to put those flags a long way apart so that the audience's journey around the different plays is so huge that they don't go, 'Oh yeah, I get it. Australian writing is this'. No. You can't put this in a box."
For the first time, the 2016 season will feature a "special event" collaboration between Griffin and Bell Shakespeare with a new adaptation of Moliere's Les Femmes Savantes by Justin Fleming.
Starring Kate Mulvany, the co-production of The Literari will transplant the 17th-century Parisian satire on intellectual pretension into 21st-century Sydney.
Lewis said she was keen to work with Bell Shakespeare and its new artistic director Peter Evans, calling it a "natural fit" because it was both a classic and a new work.
Next year's main season also features four new works by Australian writers - Ladies Day by Alana Valentine, Replay by Phillip Kavanagh, Gloria by Benedict Andrews and The Turquoise Elephant, a black comedy by Brisbane writer Stephen Carleton, who won this year's Griffin playwriting award.
Lewis said it was important new Australian works were given an opportunity because they are "written to stick in my heart".
"They help us, they challenge us, they push us and it's actually [written] for me, as an audience member, living in Sydney," she said.
"Of course, sometimes it doesn't work, but they are really trying to shift the country that we live in with their art."
She said while staging untested Australian works was a risk, it was a leap of faith that the bigger theatre companies should take more often.
"I think Belvoir has done some really, really interesting work in the last few years in that way, but I don't think the state theatre companies are doing enough," she said.
"Their scale of audience is so much bigger and so the financial risk they have with a new work - when no one really knows the story - is much bigger. They stand to lose a lot more ... I would always want to see more Australian works because I think they are really the only Australian theatre really worth doing in the long term."
Griffin's support for home-grown works also extends to its independent season for 2016, which includes the world premiere of Thomas Murray and the Upside Day River by Reg Cribb, who is experiencing a flush of success with the film adaptation of his play Last Cab to Darwin.