Shots from Phoebe Potts' performance of "Too Fat for China." Provided photo.

For the past 12 years, Sarasota’s Urbanite Theatre has made a name for itself as an incubator for new works and emerging playwrights. For the past six, Urbanite has extended that legacy with its Modern Works Festival, a new play festival dedicated to female playwrights and female theater makers. This year’s Modern Works Festival, which kicked off on September 10 and will come to a close on September 21, has been Urbanite’s biggest undertaking yet, with an expanded two week schedule.

The format of the Modern Works Festival is relatively straightforward: out of hundreds of submissions, a panel of female readers select three finalists. Those finalists are granted a production team and the opportunity to showcase their work in two staged readers, with feedback and guidance from Urbanite’s artistic team. The festival functions as a launching pad for these new works, in past years plays from the Modern Works Festival such as Kate Douglas’s The Apiary and Brenda Wither’s Westminster have both been produced by Urbanite Theatre.

Out of the 304 submissions, this year’s finalists are Stacey Isom Campbell (1999), Jenny Stafford (Ahoy-Hoy) and Sarah Cho (Screen Time). “For this year, the rules of the festival were four characters or less and no adaptations. And that's pretty much it—they don’t have to be about anything specific,” says Summer Wallace, co-founder and producing artistic director of Urbanite Theatre. “It’s always fun to see if there are any common themes that emerge amongst the plays, and this year we had a lot of plays that dealt with themes of legacy, parenthood and parental relationships.”

Campbell’s 1999 is set amidst the backdrop of academia and follows Emma, a renowned film producer and professor, who is forced to confront a traumatic moment from her past when a college student objects to the inclusion of a cancelled #MeToo-era director in the class syllabus. Stafford’s Ahoy-Hoy is a farcical romp about American ambition, legacy and the invention of the telephone. Cho’s Screen Time interrogates the practices of modern parenting and society’s increasing reliance on technology.

The Festival kicked off with a fully realized production, Phoebe Potts’ acclaimed one-woman show Too Fat for China and ends with a discussion with Nan Barnett, the Executive Director of the National New Play Network, an organization pivotal in Urbanite’s dedication to the production of new works. “I’ve been so overwhelmed over the years by how many people have said yes to participating in the festival. It’s a testament to the spirit of the festival, of women supporting women,” says Wallace. “In my dreams, I would love for this festival to continue to grow and become something where other theaters come to find new work.”

Modern Works Festival, September 10-21, Urbanite Theatre, 1487 2nd St., Sarasota, 34236

Shots from Phoebe Potts' performance of "Too Fat for China." Provided photo.

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