Urbanite Theatre’s Modern Works Festival Is Back—and It Has Plenty to Say
The Modern Works Festival returns to Urbanite Theatre September 17–27, 2026, with two lively weeks of bold new plays, fearless female voices and stories that are still fresh enough to surprise everyone—including the playwrights.
If you like your theatre bold, intimate and completely uninterested in playing it safe, Urbanite Theatre has a seat waiting for you.
As Urbanite’s largest artistic undertaking of the season, the festival is far more than a parade of performances. It is a creative laboratory where new works are tested, explored and refined in front of a live audience. Playwrights, actors, directors, designers, stage managers, technicians and other theatre professionals are given paid opportunities to collaborate and take risks. For audiences, it is a rare chance to see compelling theatre while it is still becoming theatre.
And this year’s lineup? Let’s just say subtle is not necessarily on the menu.
The festival opens with Tea TIME, Erika MacDonald’s delightfully cheeky solo show blending tea leaves, life lessons and a few strategically poured f-bombs. Its rather fabulous rallying cry—“It’s about tea. It’s about time. F*** off, I’m steeping!”—gives audiences a good idea of what is brewing.
MacDonald is an internationally touring theatre-maker based in Covington, Kentucky, whose original productions have appeared Off-Broadway and earned “Best of Fest” honors at more than 10 Fringe festivals throughout the United States and Canada. Tea TIME recently received the Critics’ Choice Award for Outstanding Solo Show at the 2026 Orlando Fringe Festival.
The quirky 60-minute production runs September 17–20, including two performances on Saturday, September 19. Consider it a theatrical cup of tea with considerably more bite than anything your grandmother served.
Following Tea TIME, the festival kicks into high gear with a party on Thursday, September 24, launching a weekend of staged readings, conversations and celebrations. This year, more than 300 scripts were submitted for consideration—a record-setting response that left Urbanite’s Board of Readers with the enviable but challenging job of choosing only three finalists.
Producing Artistic Director Summer Dawn Wallace called the selection process “a labor of love,” noting that the extraordinary number and quality of submissions reflect how much the festival has grown.
“We’re thrilled to present what promises to be our strongest festival yet,” Wallace said.
The three chosen plays prove that theatre does not need elaborate scenery or familiar titles to command attention. It simply needs something meaningful to say.
In Stacey Isom Campbell’s The Longest Walk, former Marines Mags and Fee are still fighting a war no one else can see, a decade after serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. As memories of combat crash into the realities of civilian life, their friendship becomes both a sanctuary and a reckoning. The play examines PTSD, survival and the invisible wounds carried by those who serve. Readings take place September 25 at 2 p.m. and September 26 at 5 p.m.
Campbell is an Alaska-raised, Southern-rooted playwright whose work has been recognized by the O’Neill Center National Playwrights Conference, Barter Theatre, the Great Plains Theatre Conference and numerous new-play programs across the country.
Conversations by the Beach by Mantra Radhakrishnan follows three women across 20 years and five beaches. After the death of the family patriarch, Mona and her daughters, Meenu and Mariam, experience both grief and an unexpected sense of freedom. Infused with Bharatanatyam movement, the dramedy explores growing up, letting go and redefining family on one’s own terms.
Radhakrishnan, a Chicago-based playwright, director and teaching artist from Bangalore, India, brings an imaginative physicality to the piece. Readings are scheduled for September 25 at 5 p.m. and September 26 at 7:30 p.m.
Then there is Spectres by Joz Vammer, a play that begins as a ghost hunt and quickly becomes something much more unsettling. College freshmen and lifelong friends Gracie and Roxi enter a cave looking for the legendary Woman in White. What they find forces them to confront grief, fear and the unspoken truths haunting their friendship.
Vammer’s multidisciplinary career spans theatre, film, opera, circus, dance, music and podcasting, with credits ranging from Carnegie Hall and The Kennedy Center to La Jolla Playhouse and Edinburgh Fringe. Spectres will be read September 26 and 27 at 2 p.m.
The festival also welcomes featured guest speaker Jacqueline Goldfinger for a special conversation on September 25 at 7:30 p.m. It concludes September 27 with an audience roundtable and closing celebration at 4 p.m.—because after two weeks of provocative theatre, everyone deserves the opportunity to talk about it.
The best way to experience the entire festival is with a Modern Works Festival Pass, priced at $128. An Under-40 Pass is available for $108, while student tickets remain an impressively accessible $5. Single tickets are also available.
Urbanite Theatre has built its reputation on daring honesty, intimate storytelling and championing voices that deserve to be heard. The Modern Works Festival captures all three—and adds tea, ghosts, dancing, raw emotion and just enough theatrical attitude to keep Sarasota paying attention.
For tickets, passes and the complete schedule, https://www.urbanitetheatre.com/
