Urbanite Theatre goes big for its 2025 Modern Works Festival

Anyone who has ever met Summer Dawn Wallace knows she is a relentless optimist. But the artistic director of Urbanite Theatre is also a realist who knows how to live in the now. 

Wallace's not sure if Urbanite's annual Modern Works Festival celebrating female playwrights will be back next year because of economic and political headwinds. But she's determined to make this year's festival the best in its six-year history.

Wallace has expanded Modern Works from one week to two this year and has added a full-blown production to kick off the festival, which runs from Sept. 10-21 at Urbanite's black box theater in downtown Sarasota. 

At the same time, she has cut the number of staged readings of the three plays in competition from three to two.

Photo by Sorcha Augustine

"This is a really challenging time in terms of grant funding. This festival wouldn’t be possible without generosity of female donors," Wallace says. "There’s like 33 people working on the festival. We believe in paying artists a living wage, even the people who screen the plays."

What Urbanite has dubbed as the "headlining production" of Modern Works is Phoebe Potts' "Too Fat for China," an autobiographical tale that follows a comic storyteller and a self-described "professional Jew" as she tries to adopt a baby both in the U.S. and overseas.

Back in 2010, Potts wrote a graphic novel called "Good Eggs," which chronicles the author and her husband's struggles to conceive in both a humorous and heartbreaking way.

A resident of Gloucester, Massachusetts, Potts' "day jobs" have included union organizing, teaching after-school art programs and helping adults and children to learn the Torah through visual methods.

Last year, the keynote speaker of the Modern Works Festival was playwright Lauren Gunderson, known for such plays as "I and You," "Silent Sky" and "The Book of Will." (Gunderson fans will be glad to hear that her sendup of the fantasy romance world, "Lady Disdain," will be produced by Asolo Repertory Theatre in June 2026 in a rolling world premiere.)

Speaking of rolling premieres, this year's keynote speaker at the Modern Works Festival will be Nan Barnett, executive director of the National New Play Network, an alliance of 100 professional theaters dedicated to developing, producing and sharing new work.

Through its Rolling World Premiere program, the organization funds the development and production of plays, which then make their debut at three or four different theaters across the country.

Modern Works attracts bold-faced names as speakers, but its raison d'etre is a playwriting competition. A panel of paid female screeners selects three plays to be read live by real actors during the festival, where adjudicators, panelists and audience members decide who will take home a $3,200 prize. 

This year's three finalists are: 

• "1999," Stacey Isom Campbell's play about three women whose lives intersect in the aftermath of #metoo trauma;
• "Ahoy-hoy," Jenny Stafford's tale about American innovation in the 1870s that gets its name from the greeting that Alexander Graham Bell proposed for answering the telephone; and 
• "Screen Time," Sarah Cho's exploration of raising kids in an era where parents are inundated constantly by online advice and supposedly helpful apps.

Some of these festival plays may be produced by Urbanite in future seasons, the way that Brenda Withers' "Westminster" and Rosa Fernandez's "A Skeptic and a Bruja" were.

"The Apiary," another Modern Works finalist, will make its regional premiere at Urbanite from March 20 through April 19, 2026, but there are no guarantees that the plays will be produced. 

Playwrights are in the driver's seat

Still, in the world of theater, receiving a staged reading for your play is a big deal, especially at a venue such as Urbanite, which has made a name for itself in regional theater with its fearless exploration of new works.

To the casual theater goer, it may not be immediately apparent that the Modern Works Festival is dedicated to showcasing the new work of female playwrights and to celebrating women in theater because the words "women" and "female" are not in the festival's title. But if you know, you know.

Who comes to Urbanite for the Modern Works Festival and finds parking in the Whole Foods garage across the street? According to Wallace, "Urbanite diehards who really love new works. It's a different kind of experience. Audiences are really having the opportunity to see a play in development." 

It should be noted that Modern Works attracts male patrons and actors to watch play readings, participate in audience talkbacks and mingle at parties.

At Modern Works, playwrights are in the driver's seat, Wallace says. They can tinker if they want to, but they don't have to make script changes. But the pace can be frenetic for dramatists and actors. "It's fast and furious," she says. "There are 16 hours of rehearsal for the staged readings."

One of the things that Wallace enjoys most about Modern Works is watching the barriers between audience members break down during the course of the festival. "In the beginning, the audience is pretty quiet," she says. 

But as they get to know each other, it takes more of an effort to get patrons to settle down so that a reading or discussion can start on time. "They just can't stop talking because they are so excited. It's a great thing to see," Wallace says.