Back at Urbanite Theatre for the sixth year, the Modern Works Festival has expanded into a two-week celebration of women in theatre!
New to this year's Festival is the addition of a fully staged headlining production. TOO FAT FOR CHINA, written, performed, and illustrated by Phoebe Potts, will be presented as a five-show run at the top of the Festival.
Then, join us for staged readings of three new works by three women playwrights. 1999 by Stacey Isom Campbell, AHOY-HOY by Jenny Stafford, and SCREEN TIME by Sarah Cho.
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Sprinkled throughout the Festival will be a guest speaker events, a round table, and kick-off party.
Remy Washington, a Black man and widower, has inherited both a drive-in movie theater and the responsibility of raising Pup, his late husband’s straight, white teenage son. The two forge a strong bond around a shared love of classic American monster movies, but when Remy discovers that Pup has been tormenting a gay classmate, their relationship begins to fracture, and the real horrors surface.
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Beneath the flickering glow of the drive-in screen, MONSTERS OF THE AMERICAN CINEMA becomes a haunting, funny, and unexpectedly tender tale of fatherhood and loss that the Los Angeles Times hails as “exhilarating.”
It’s January 2020. Jane has been placed on leave from her Big Tech job after a viral workplace incident. She’s hell-bent on returning, but first, her assigned therapist, Loyd, needs to authorize it. Loyd suspects her work might be doing more harm than good.
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A tightly wound psychological thriller, JOB zooms in on two careerists of different generations, genders, and paradigms to examine what it means to be a citizen of the internet and our obligation to help the people who need it most.
It’s 22 years into the future, and honeybees are nearly extinct, except for those kept alive in labs. When a shocking event leads to an even more shocking boost in bee populations, an overqualified new lab assistant, Zora, and her talkative
co-worker Pilar must decide just how far they’ll go to keep the population growing... and the whole thing under wraps from their overstressed, budget-conscious supervisor, Gwen.
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Named a New York Times Critic’s Pick, this “bright, strange and mesmerizing marvel” is a provocative comedy about sacrifice and the ethics of discovery, penned by 2022 Modern Works Festival finalist Kate Douglas.
The sharp-witted, glamorous, incomparable Eartha Kitt commands the spotlight. But backstage in her dressing room, in the quiet between songs, she peels back the glitz to reveal Eartha Mae: a girl from the South Carolina cotton fields, orphaned by her mother until an audience adopted her.
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Told through both story and song, Urbanite Theatre’s first-ever musical production unearths the complex truth behind the icon: “I’m a dirt person. I trust the dirt. I don’t trust diamonds and gold.”
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In WHO IS EARTHA MAE?, Jade Wheeler, playwright and performer, brings to life a powerful woman in search of happiness and the roots she never forgets.