Mo Labor - Stage Reading - September

An Afrofuturist Labor Day play from The American Calendar Cycle

Join us for a developmental staged reading of MO LABOR, a new Labor Day play written and directed by Dr. Austin Dean Ashford as part of The American Calendar Cycle.

On Labor Day in a near-future Midwestern fulfillment center, the workers of MegaMart gather around the loading dock for food, jokes, old songs, and one last breath of normalcy before automation changes everything. Ruthie, a retired warehouse worker and lifelong union believer, still sees labor as proof that her life mattered. Jamal, her newly fired nephew, hides his fear of becoming useless behind humor and revolution. Desiree, an exhausted single mother with the wrong name on her badge and a secret growing inside her, is trying to survive a job that keeps taking from her body. Trent, a preacher and former labor organizer, carries buried shame from a strike that changed all of their lives.

Watching over them is a strange company Smart Radio that shifts between corporate assistant, break-room comedian, labor archive, ancestral witness, and something dangerously alive. When MegaMart announces that human work has been permanently discontinued, what first sounds like freedom begins to feel like erasure. As badges fail, lockers open, secrets surface, and the radio starts remembering what the company tried to delete, the workers must confront a haunting question: if work no longer defines them, who do they become?

Blending comedy, poetic language, Afrofuturist imagination, Black labor history, warehouse culture, family drama, and raw community debate, MO LABOR explores what happens when the clock finally stops. Through scanners, union pins, broken badges, wrong names, old strike recordings, and one Labor Day banner transformed into a sign for the future, the play asks: Can a people build a life beyond survival without forgetting the work that kept them alive?

This is a full staged reading — a live workshop performance where the script is still being shaped. Your presence matters: your laughter, reactions, and feedback help strengthen the next draft.

• Full staged reading
• Run time: approximately 1 hour and 45 minutes
• Brief talkback with the cast and creative team following the reading
• Drinks and light refreshments available — arrive early or right on time

If you love bold new theatre, Black dramatic writing, Afrofuturist storytelling, workplace dramas, family secrets, layered conversations about technology and labor, and work that carries humor, heat, politics, history, and heart at the same time — this night is for you.