The word "cosplay" is a portmanteau of “costume play,” and the activity's participants—cosplayers—wear costumes and fashion accessories to represent specific characters.

For playwright Shavonne Coleman, cosplay is a way to open the doors of creativity to children and put them on the road to being superheroes.

Eastern Michigan University Theatre is presenting the world premiere production of Coleman’s Cause Play on April 3-6, with school matinee performances on April 7-8.

Last year a staged reading of Cause Play was presented in May at EMU in collaboration with Ann Arbor Spinning Dot Theatre as part of the TYA BIPOC Superhero Project. That collaboration continues with the premiere of the fully acted production.

Coleman is an alumna of EMU and an associate professor of theater at the University of Michigan's Department of Music, Theatre, and Dance.

Cause Play centers on three middle school students, Zuvi, Zipper and Aaron, who meet at an after-school cosplay club at the Southwest Academy Magnet Middle School in Detroit. They discover their talents in creating costumes and adopting identities with the goal of attending a Comic Con—as well as developing their secret powers along the way. Coleman said there were changes made following the staged reading in response to the audiences who wanted the students to go to the Comic Con.

The Neighborhood Theatre Group’s small, minimalist theater is an intimate space for what it calls an anthology play in four parts.

The seating is limited. The stage area is small. The audience is practically part of the scene.

All these limitations are a plus for a theater that emphasizes a tight story, engaged actors, and a very different theater experience, especially for a production like The Hotel Del Gado.

The anthology drama will conclude its two-weekend schedule March 14-16 at The Back Office Studio in Ypsilanti. 

Its four plays are set in a cheap, rundown hotel room. The time is the 1970s. The Neighborhood Theatre Group (NTG) co-founder and literary manager A.M. Dean created a conceit that many of the NTG plays will be set in a place called the Huron Valley Universe, drawing on the college towns of Ypsilanti, Ann Arbor, and East Lansing.

You realize which adaptation of Jane Austen’s classic novel Sense and Sensibility has left the strongest impression on you when—in the opening moments of a stage performance—you find yourself thinking, “OK, that’s the Emma Thompson sister, and that’s Kate Winslet.”

Yes, the much-celebrated 1995 film, directed by Ang Lee, casts a long shadow, but Sense & Sensibility: The Musical, now having its Michigan premiere at Dexter’s Encore Theatre, nonetheless offers its unique spin on the material.

With a book, music, and lyrics by Paul Gordon (who also previously adapted Jane Eyre into a Tony-nominated stage musical), Sense streamlines Austen’s world of characters down to the bone, a move that—given the economic and relational complexities of the story—occasionally makes plot turns confusing.

But I’m getting ahead of myself, dear reader, but first, a synopsis.

Dark, steel gray walls loom ominously as the moody setting for Aaron Sorkin’s breakthrough, lacerating portrayal of a troubled military.

Sorkin’s A Few Good Men seems like just the right play at just the right time for the University of Michigan Department of Theatre and Drama's on-point production at the Power Center.

Director Geoff Packard writes in his program notes that he began to see the play through “a different lens with a new set of images in my mind.”

“Like many of you, I find myself grappling with a complicated relationship with America today, questioning who we are, who we’ve been and where we are headed as a nation,” he writes. “The world in the play, as I read it now, is no longer the hopeful vision I once imagined. It has become grayer, darked and more monolithic.”

Even as I accepted the assignment to attend and write about asses.masses—a daylong collaborative video game art installation brought to Ann Arbor on February 15-16 by UMS—I wondered why I’d made this choice.

It would take me away from my family for nearly an entire Saturday (the program ran from 1-9:30 pm); I’d have to drive from Farmington to Stamps Auditorium on a snowy, freezing February day, all too aware that I’d also be hosting guests in my home the next morning; I had no idea what kind of food would be provided at the event; and while I’m an absolute puzzle fiend, I’m decidedly not a gamer. (The whole idea of Twitch, where viewers can watch others play video games, is something I still struggle to wrap my head around.)

If I’ve learned anything in recent years, though, it’s that I should always follow my curiosity, and I’d repeatedly wondered what this collective all-day video game experience would look and feel like.

My short answer, after attending asses.masses? Community-building. But let’s start with the basics.

Created by Canadian duo Patrick Blendarn and Milton Lim, the game’s narrative involves a herd of donkeys who have been replaced, as workers, by machines, so many of them decide to confront their human overlords and push back against their (existential) obsolescence.

Imagine a time in the near future when scientists develop a procedure that will allow some people to become near immortals.

Lisa Sanaye Dring’s play Kairos is an interesting idea but her real subject is how precarious relationships can become when threatened.

Theatre Nova is presenting Kairos as part of the National New Play Network Rolling World Review, which includes stagings by other theater companies in Cincinnati and Los Angeles.

Kairos doesn’t begin as a sci-fi thriller. The challenge of immortal life is offered up as a unique test of human relations. So the play opens not with mad scientists but with two people looking for love.

It begins when two drivers have a minor car accident, which opens the door to romance. David and Gina are in their early 30s. David is black, Gina is white. David is attracted to Gina and she’s interested in learning about him, and so begins their sometimes blissfully happy and sometimes darkly unhappy relationship. Dring tells their story in a series of short vignettes.

Funerals can be sad, yes, but they can also be funny and even life-changing.

The Purple Rose Theatre is presenting the Michigan premiere of Eric Feffinger’s Fourteen Funerals, a very funny comedy with a very serious look at friendship, family, and life from the perspective of two very different women from two very different places.

Sienna is a young Chicago woman with aspirations of becoming a published writer. She has received a confusing call to come to small town Blissfield, Indiana, to present a eulogy for a relative she’s never met. She’s intrigued, she’s curious, she needs money, she needs to escape from Chicago if just for a day. But when she arrives she’s informed that 14 relatives have all died in an explosion of fireworks and she must give a eulogy for all of them at 14 separate funerals.

Millie is the funeral director’s daughter who has asked her to come. Millie is a young woman who loves Blissfield and hates Blissfield. But she’s ever optimistic. She’s learning all the ins and outs of being a funeral director. She’s funny, even a little goofy and leary about the woman from the city.

Corruption collides with confusion and bureaucracy with buffoonery in the University of Michigan School of Music, Theatre & Dance’s production of The Government Inspector, adapted by Jeffrey Hatcher in 2009 from Nikolai Gogol’s 1836 play.

While the original play was set in Russia circa 1836, Malcolm Tulip's version could be anywhere, anytime that corruption is common—but certainly not here or now.

“We’ve taken things from different periods,” says Tulip, who directs U-M musical theater students in the production, which runs February 20-23 at the Arthur Miller Theatre.

The play is set in a small village where everyone in a position of power is corrupt. “Six gymnasiums have been built to get names on buildings they don’t need,” Tulip says.

When the crooked leadership learns an undercover inspector is coming to root out corruption, they panic. They bribe. They flatter. They flirt. The inspector moves into the mayor’s house and receives large “loans” from the local officials. “They fall over backward to make sure he’ll say good things about them,” says Tulip. “On another level, the mistreated peasants come across as the resistance.”

In April 1993, I took my first step into the world of Rocky Horror.

I went with three high school friends to see a midnight screening and shadow cast of The Rocky Horror Picture Show at the State Theatre in Ann Arbor.

Upon arrival at the theatre, I was greeted by one of the shadow-cast actors fully dressed in her costume. She walked over to me and asked, “Are you a virgin?”

Somewhat taken aback, I asked, “Who wants to know?”

The actor just laughed and said, “You’re my very special virgin.”

Being a naïve, clueless teen and new to Rocky Horror, I didn’t get the reference at first. I thought the actor was nosy and wondered why she asked me such a personal question.

Her question didn’t click with me, though, until the start of the show. As the emcee, she made some announcements and invited me to join her on stage as the “Very Special Virgin.”

When you’re a theater critic, you sometimes drive home from a show and think, “Huh. Not exactly sure what I’ll say about this one.”

Nate — A One Man Show, presented by the University Musical Society at the Arthur Miller Theatre, is one of those shows.

Because by its very nature, Nate will be a little different at every performance with its extensive audience participation and thus, some improv. The brainchild of creator/performer Natalie Palamides, the hour-long production focuses on a man who blasts toxic masculinity out into the world while nursing a broken heart.

The show fittingly starts with what feels like a punch to the face: the blisteringly loud opening chords of George Thoroughgood’s “Bad to the Bone” playing as helmeted, shades-wearing Nate rides around the stage on a mini-motorcycle. Absurdly silly, messy, performative demonstrations of masculinity (the consumption of a raw egg, meat, and whey powder) followed, in case there remained any lingering questions regarding the kind of guy we were dealing with.