Watermelon Eating Contest

Directed by Jovani Lugo, Lili Stiefel, and Steview Walker-Webb. Written by Stevie Walker-Webb, Adapted from "The Watermelon Eating Contest" by Dr. Danny Hoey. The Watermelon Eating Contest, a political Avant Garde comedy, sardonically addresses issues of race, pedagogical diversity, and power dynamics in the classroom, concluding with a surrealist nightmare of violent imagery and racist stereotypes. Melanie Waters, a Ph.D. candidate, is in the midst of writing her dissertation, which focuses on the writings of acclaimed Black authors Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, and Zora Neale Hurston. When Waters loses her graduate assistantship, she is forced to teach at a low-income middle school, where she’s confronted with her class privilege and is challenged by her students and co-workers at every turn. TWEC critically poses the questions: What does it mean to be an activist in today’s society? How do we engage the violent history of the past in a way that doesn’t doom us to that history?