Karmo Sanders had a knack for reaching people.

In TV commercials for the Maine retail chain Marden’s, she turned a zany, effervescent bargain hunter into somebody whom audiences related to and looked forward to seeing. At the University of Southern Maine, she infused her acting for nonmajors class with such passion and energy that sometimes students would change their major to theater by the time the course was done.

Sanders, who died in October at 74, continues to engage with actors and audiences. The Maine Playwrights Festival, opening Friday at Stevens Square Theater in Portland, is dedicated to her memory. One of the festival’s premieres will be a 10-minute play Sanders wrote years ago, called “Ethelrid and the Green Door.” In it, a young musician seeks to create art while a gatekeeper known as “the conductor” throws up obstacles.

“It’s a little bit of a meditation on art and mortality, what it means to be an artist and what we leave behind,” said Liz Carlson, artistic director of the Maine Playwrights Festival. “So it’s very poignant. It feels like a perfect way to honor her.”

The festival runs mostly over two weekends, beginning Friday and ending May 24. The focus will be on seven 10-minute plays, all by Maine writers and all being performed for the first time. There will also be staged readings of three one-act plays.

The festival is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year, and tickets are available on a pay-what-you-can basis. Besides Sanders’ play, the other short works being presented include “At Sword’s Length” by Todd Brian Backus; “Barb & Cass Go to the Zoo” by Reba Askari; “People We Meet at Theatre School” by Julia Jennings; “Soul Suds” by Bess Welden; “We Were Caught Wandering” by Megan Tripaldi; and “While You Wait” by Joshua W. Jackson.

Carlson, who also lectures in the theater department at USM, said she and others wanted to have one of Sanders’ plays performed at the festival to “make sure her work still gets to be out in the world.” So Sanders’ daughters, Hanna and Jennywren, found some of her short plays and sent about a dozen to Carlson and festival organizers to choose from.

The play they chose, “Ethelrid and the Green Door,” is set in a “mystical, fairy-esque land,” said Juliet Tasker, a former student of Sanders’ who is directing the work. The musician, who plays an instrument akin to a violin, wants to sit in with a magical musical group but is blocked by the group’s conductor, who puts up various barriers. The musician has to decide whether they feel strong enough to play, to create art, without permission.

“It’s unexpected, for anyone who looks at her as the ‘Marden’s Lady,’ but completely expected from someone as deeply introspective and invested in art as Karmo is,” said Tasker. “It feels like a diary entry.”

Sanders, who lived in Scarborough, spent more than four decades in the arts as a playwright, performer, teacher and accidental TV star. She and her husband, Jerry Sanders, helped create the musical review “Radical Radio,” which toured the East Coast in the 1990s. Sanders and her husband also wrote a Broadway-style musical called “Gold Rush Girls,” which played in Anchorage, Alaska, in 2012.

Her “Marden’s Lady” character, Birdie Googins, was on TV screens all over Maine for several years until Marden’s ended the ad campaign in 2013. Afterwards, Sanders did stand-up comedy as the beloved Googins.

Sanders wrote the play “Homer Bound,” which had a sold-out run at Good Theater in Portland in 2018. It was about a wacky shotgun wedding on a Maine island, complete with an onstage baby delivery. Since 2017 she’d been teaching playwrighting and acting for nonmajors at USM.

When Carlson became artistic director of the Maine Playwrights Festival a couple years ago, one of the first people she talked to about its mission and direction was Sanders. Sanders was a strong proponent of focusing on 10-minute plays, a common play form. By featuring shorter plays, the festival could include more works and give more opportunities to more Maine playwrights.

“It’s such a privilege and such an extraordinary thing for a playwright to get their work onstage, and Karmo really pushed for that,” Carlson said.