2025 Season of Shows

HIDDEN HERSTORIES… ABORTION RIGHTS. DETERMINATION. PERSECUTION. INNOVATION.

Celebrating 25 Years in 2025: A season of impact and insight coming to new stages and spaces near you.

HCC Ybor
Mainstage

Sponsored by

Written by Paula Kamen, Jane: Abortion and the Underground is a timely and provocative part-documentary drama about “the best-kept secret” in Chicago, “Jane,” an underground abortion service that operated from 1969 to 1973. The script is based on Kamen’s original interviews, including very rare interviews with women not in Jane who used the illegal service. This network, run by a feminist collective of mostly middle-class housewives and students, was the safe alternative for an estimated 8,000- 11,000 Chicago women of all backgrounds (as reported by Jane members). In all those years, “Jane,” which boasted no fatalities and operated in private apartments throughout the city, was well trusted by and commonly received referrals from police, university administrators, social workers, clergy, and hospital staff. It gives an inspiring and unapologetic story — too relevant today — of feminist resistance and organizing to meet women’s most immediate and critical needs. The play also reveals how even under the best of circumstances, illegal abortion can be harrowing.

POWERUP staged reading benefits Tampa Bay Abortion Fund.

The Studio
@620

On the day of a much-anticipated speech by Rosa Parks during the height of the Civil Rights Movement, four activists working in a Virginia civil rights office ponder whether the proclamation of equality amongst mankind includes women. With remarkable insight and unexpected humor, Cadillac Crew, written by Tori Sampson, reclaims the stories of the forgotten leaders who blazed the trail for desegregation and women’s rights, asking: when will the world be ready to embrace women in all their capacity? From the Civil Rights Movement to the present day, Cadillac Crew illuminates these forgotten leaders and explores what happens when Black women refuse to be written out of history.

USF School of
Theatre & Dance

USF’s portion of the festival is funded entirely through the Dishman Fund for Playwriting. No state funds from USF are supporting this project.

The fifth annual “Voices of Women Theatre Festival” will showcase 16 original plays from novice and veteran women playwrights. The festival will include self-produced 10-minute plays and Powerstories-produced full-length staged readings of two full-length plays.

Stageworks
Theatre

In Witch Hunt, written by Liz Duffy Adams, ten years after Abigail Williams, instigator of the witch trials, disappeared from Salem, she turns up at the tavern of her fellow ex-witch-hunter, Mercy Lewis. About to leave the colonies forever, it’s her last chance to understand the madness that overtook them. But with war threatening northern New England yet again, Mercy and her fellow townspeople are in no mood for Abigail’s doubts, which suggest complicity with the devil. And just when everything is most dangerously tense—the devil himself shows up.

Stageworks
Theatre

At the dawn of the British Industrial Revolution, Ada Byron Lovelace, a fiery young inventor and the daughter of the flamboyant poet Lord Byron, discovers the boundless creative potential of “analytical engines.” With her friend and soulmate Charles Babbage, the inventor of the first mechanical computer, Ada dreams of a new world where art and technology converge. In Ada and the Engine, written by Lauren Gunderson, Ada envisions a future where these “analytic engines” transform society, blending art and information in ways she might not live to see. This music-laced story of love, friendship, and visionary dreams is a poignant pre-tech romance where Jane Austen meets Steve Jobs.