In 1925, Dr. Ossian Sweet and his wife Gladys moved out of Detroit’s Black-only neighborhood, Black Bottom, into an all-white Detroit neighborhood. They wanted a better life for themselves and their infant daughter.

Ossian Sweet was afraid that they had made a dangerous decision.

They moved on September 8, 1925. The first night there were racist catcalls but nothing serious. The next evening a mob surrounded the new home as Sweet, his brothers, and others gathered again in the house. Ossian was prepared with guns as the mob attacked the house, but the police ignored pleas from the Sweets. A white man was killed. The police raided the Sweet home and arrested 12 people including Ossian Sweet, Gladys Atkinson Sweet, Ossian’s brothers, and friends.

This led to a historic trial that brought the renowned civil rights lawyer Clarence Darrow to Detroit.

Playwright D.L. Patrick takes a different view of these historic events and shifts the attention from Ossian Sweet to his wife, Gladys. Patrick’s title for the play is a good summary of yet another example of a woman not given her due, Eclipsed: The Sun, The Moon, and Gladys Atkinson Sweet.

Theatre Nova is presenting the world premiere of Patrick’s play. It’s an emotional, intimate look at a family that struggles to lead a better life and is trapped by the vile racism that is still a major mark of shame in America’s history.

Families are fragile. Children become adults and go their separate ways. Everybody has their own quirks, complaints, successes, and failures.

Paul Stroili’s play My Mother and the Michigan/Ohio War, at the Purple Rose Theatre through May 25, finds just the right blend of family reconciliation and a rediscovered sense of humor, built around two obsessive wars.

Every year it’s a war.

You know the war: the mighty Wolverines versus that school in Columbus, Ohio.

Every other football game takes a back seat to The Game. This past season, the Buckeyes lost to the Wolverines and the coach had to win the national championship to keep his job. 

Fred Campbell was a big fan of The Game. The home he shared with his wife Izzy was a shrine to the University of Michigan Wolverines. It was his passion.

His other passion was the Toledo War of 1835-1836 to determine who got to claim the Toledo Strip. Ohio was already a state and Michigan would only become a state if a compromise could be reached. Michigan finally capitulated after agreeing to accept the Upper Peninsula and Ohio would keep the Toledo strip. Time would show that Michigan got the better deal.

Two University of Michigan professors are putting a different spin on  L. Frank Baum’s beloved The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

Jose Casas, head of the playwriting minor in the Theatre & Drama department, has written Our Oz as “a reimagination of the The Wizard of Oz through a BIPOC and queer lens” Jake Hooker, head of drama at the Residential College, is the director.

Our Oz is being presented April 4-13 at the Arthur Miller Theatre on U-M’s North Campus.

The collaboration between Casas, Hooker, and theater students is a story in progress and described in the show's notes as “Intersectional and interdisciplinary, this project will evolve over the course of the next year, exploring and experimenting with the tropes and images of multiple renditions from the Land of Oz as originally conceived by L. Frank Baum.”

Our Oz is very different from Baum’s or MGM’s version of Oz. The set is a street in a tough neighborhood. The opening music is the loud grind of industrial machinery. An older Dorothy is in distress and somehow magically ends up with her dog, Toto, in a place that is very much like the place she just left.

Ghosts are haunting the Lydia Mendelssohn Theatre this weekend with a gothic opera based on Henry James’ spooky and unsettling novella The Turn of the Screw.

British composer Benjamin Britten’s score is chilling, a perfect screech of modern music to tell the tale of an inexperienced and disturbed governess and two neglected children.

The University of Michigan School of Music, Theatre & Dance Department of Voice & Opera and the Contemporary Directions Ensemble are presenting The Turn of the Screw composed by Britten with a libretto by Myfanwy Piper, March 27-30 at the Mendelssohn. Two casts will perform. The cast from Thursday, March 27, will perform on Saturday, March 29. Another cast will perform on Friday, March 28, and Sunday, March 30.

The opera begins with three people exchanging ghost stories on a chilly Christmas Eve in a manor house. The most complex story is about the timid, anxious governess at Bly House who was hired by the uncle of two unruly children who may or may not be seeing ghosts. The governess is helped and advised by the housekeeper who tells her the story of the previous governess Miss Jessel and Peter Quint, the uncle’s manservant. Both are now dead. The children, a boy and a girl, are having a hard time—and maybe they’re in touch with ghosts.

When I was a lad I served a term
As office boy at an attorneys firm
I cleaned the window and I swept the floor
As I polished up the handle on the big front door
I polished up the handle so carefully
That now I am the ruler of the Queen’s Navee
                                                           —W.S. Gilbert

It seems like Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic operas never grow old.

Whether it’s Sir Joseph Porter bragging that he never went to sea and became the Ruler of the Queen’s Navee in H.M.S. Pinafore or the ambitious Lord High Executioner KoKo making a list of enemies (who never will be missed) in The Mikado, the biting satire still rings as strong as ever, maybe even stronger. Arthur Sullivan’s pliable music still moves gracefully from comic to lushly romantic and W.S. Gilbert’s librettos are as fresh now as they were in the 1870s..

The University of Michigan’s Gilbert and Sullivan Society (UMGASS) is presenting H.M.S. Pinafore at the Lydia Mendelssohn Theatre, April 3-6.

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.

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.”

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.