Three New Plays, One Wild Week, and the Theatre That Refused to Compromise to Get There

Urbanite Theatre's Modern Works Festival is back for its seventh year, and it's still the biggest swing Sarasota theatre takes all season: two weeks, one headlining solo show, three brand-new plays getting their very first full readings in front of a live audience, and a whole lot of people in a room together deciding what gets to exist next. If you've never been, September 17–27, 2026 is the year to start.

The Festival opens with Tea TIME by Erika MacDonald, a 60-minute solo show that has apparently never met a Fringe Festival it didn't win — including a Critics' Choice Award for Outstanding Solo Show at Orlando Fringe 2026. MacDonald's own pitch says it best: it's about tea, it's about time, and she is, emphatically, steeping. Five performances, September 17–20, with a Saturday and Sunday double-header.

After a kickoff party on September 24, the Festival moves into its heart — staged readings of the three finalists, chosen from a record-breaking 300+ submissions this year.

The Longest Walk by Stacey Isom Campbell follows two female Marines a decade past their service in Iraq and Afghanistan, still fighting a war nobody else can see. It's a first draft — Isom Campbell has heard maybe ten pages of it out loud at a time, in a year-long weekly workshop, but never the whole thing performed together. That happens for the first time on an Urbanite stage this September, in front of an audience that gets to weigh in afterward on what the play becomes next. This is Isom Campbell's second year at Modern Works; her play 1999 got its reading here in 2025 and moves into a full production next year.
September 25 @ 2pm · September 26 @ 5pm

Conversations By The Beach by Mantra Radhakrishnan traces a mother and her two daughters across twenty years and five beaches, navigating grief and unexpected freedom after the death of the family patriarch, woven through with Bharathanatyam movement.
September 25 @ 5pm · September 26 @ 7:30pm

Spectres by Joz Vammer sends two lifelong best friends into a cave chasing a ghost story and finds them confronting something far more personal in the dark.
September 26 @ 2pm · September 27 @ 2pm

A conversation with guest speaker Jacqueline Goldfinger and a closing Audience Round Table wrap the Festival on the 27th.

It's easy to assume new play festivals are for playwrights and industry insiders — people who already know what a "music stand reading" is. They're not. Isom Campbell puts it simply: she's not writing for theatre people, she's writing for the person walking in with zero context, hoping to find something human in a story that might be nothing like their own. Every reading has a talkback built in for exactly that reason — your reaction, in the room, is part of how these scripts get finished. Come back next year and you may see your own notes in the final draft.

That kind of runway — real rehearsal time, paid collaborators, a live audience before the stakes get high — is disappearing fast across the industry. The Yale Drama Prize doesn't exist anymore. The O'Neill's National Playwrights Conference took four scripts this year instead of its usual six to eight. Grant money that used to underwrite this work keeps shrinking, and the festivals still standing get bombarded with entries because there are fewer of them left.

Which is part of what makes this particular festival worth paying attention to right now. Days before announcing this lineup, Urbanite became the only Sarasota County arts organization to decline its 2027 tourist tax grant — turning down $40,230 rather than sign new contract language tied to Florida's ban on public DEI funding. Marketing Director Hannah Levite called it a difficult decision, but the right one. It's the kind of choice that's easy to praise in the abstract and considerably harder to make when you're a small storefront theatre and the number attached to it is real. Modern Works exists to hand a stage to voices — this year, three female playwrights — who have fewer stages available to them than they used to. That an organization is willing to protect that mission at actual cost isn't a footnote to the festival. It's a sign of how seriously they take it.

Festival passes are $128 ($108 under 40) and get you into everything — Tea TIME, all three staged readings, the kickoff party, and the guest speaker conversation. Single tickets are also available, and student tickets remain $5, as always.

What: 2026 Modern Works Festival (7th annual)
When: September 17–27, 2026
Where: Urbanite Theatre, 1487 2nd St., Sarasota, FL
Tickets & full schedule: urbanitetheatre.com/mwf · box office (941) 321-1397