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The Summer Shorts series is back at the Arsht to tell our South Florida stories

Eight people pose for a photo together.
Arsht Center
Lolita Stewart-White (center, in orange) is an African American playwright, poet and screenwriter from Miami's Liberty City neighborhood. Ariel Cipolla (center-right, in green) is a Mexican-Argentine playwright in Miami.

Lots of plays roll into town that tell us about other lives in other places. But the Summer Shorts series at the Arsht Center is telling our South Florida stories.

This year, City Theatre is putting on eight plays, 10 minutes each — directed by different up-and-coming local playwrights. They worked with master playwright Vanessa Garcia to mine their stories and tell them on stage. The Theater’s goal is to help support South Florida writers who are Black, Indigenous or people of color.

They're calling this series the Homegrown edition. Two of playwrights were featured on the show today.

Ariel Cipolla was born in Mexico City but raised in Miami. He saw the duality in what it means to be a kid today — sculpting separate personalities for online and the real world. And that’s at the heart of his play, "The Vultures." His play follows three teenage girls, planning to rebrand themselves before starting high school.

Lolita Stewart-White is poet and screenwriter from Liberty City. In her play “Seven,” she explores why people get married. She asks: what would happen if every seven years, couples had to renew that contract?

On the June 15 episode of Sundial, Cipolla and Stewart-White talk to us about why they wanted to write about these different local stories, and see them performed on stage.

On Sundial's previous episode, Maria Elena Fernandez joined us to talk about her new book, which is an oral history of the first 10 years of the show RuPaul's Drag Race.

Listen to Sundial Monday through Thursday on WLRN, 91.3 FM, live at 1 p.m., rebroadcast at 8 p.m. Missed a show? Find every episode of Sundial on your favorite podcast app, such as Apple Podcasts, Stitcher and Spotify.

Carlos Frías is a bilingual writer, a journalist of more than 25 years and the author of an award-winning memoir published by Simon & Schuster.
Helen Acevedo, is WLRN's anchor for All Things Considered.
Elisa Baena is a former associate producer for Sundial.