Modern Works Festival

Back for the sixth year and taking place at Urbanite Theatre, the 2025 Modern Works Festival has expanded into a two-week playwriting and reading festival and a celebration of women in theatre.
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The Festival will kick off with the one-woman brainchild of Phoebe Potts: TOO FAT FOR CHINA. Written, drawn, and performed by Potts, TOO FAT FOR CHINA (Sep 11-14) is a comic look at the agony of adoption.

A panel of readers has selected three playwrights as finalists: Stacey Isom Campbell (1999), Jenny Stafford (AHOY-HOY), and Sarah Cho (SCREEN TIME). Each playwright will have a production team and the chance to present their new work in two staged readings, receiving guidance from our artistic team, a dramaturge, and audience discussions.

Modern Works Finalist #1-1999 by Stacey Isom Campbell
When a college student protests the inclusion of a film by a disgraced #MeToo-era director in her syllabus, acclaimed producer and professor Emma is forced to confront a pivotal moment from her own past. Set against the backdrop of academia and the lasting echoes of the 1990s film industry, this compelling new play weaves together the stories of three women whose lives intersect in the aftermath of trauma. With sharp insight, it interrogates the moral complexities of consuming and teaching controversial art, raising urgent questions about culpability, memory, and power dynamics.
September 19 at 2pm, September 20 at 5pm

Modern Works Finalist #2-Ahoy-Hoy by Jenny Stafford
A Play About That Relatable Feeling When Someone Else Invents the Telephone Three Hours Before You Do.
It’s 1876 and also, right now. Elisha Gray is this close to inventing the telephone. He’s brilliant, anxious, and ready to make history… if Alexander Graham Bell doesn’t beat him to it. Spoiler: he kind of does. Two oversized egos. One telephone. A battle of beards and bell tones. Ahoy-Hoy is a deliriously unhinged, unapologetic sprint through American ambition, innovation, and the absurd quest for legacy. History has never been this ridiculous or this fun.
September 19 at 5pm, September 20 at 7:30pm

Modern Works Finalist#3-Screen Time by Sarah Cho
Ben and Julia are overjoyed to be expecting their first child, but are they actually ready for the realities of parenting? Luckily, there’s an app for that. As they navigate the chaos of modern life, the couple turns to the ultimate parenting tool to guide them through sleepless nights and existential panic. But with every push notification, the line between helpful and horrifying starts to blur.
Screen Time is a sharp, unsettling comedy about raising children in a world ruled by screens, and the creeping anxiety that maybe just maybe we're doing it all wrong.
September 20 at 2pm, September 21 at 2pm