Meme Resnick’s interest in Dungeons & Dragons started when she transferred to a new high school in her junior year.  A friend suggested that she might like to learn about the popular role-playing game.

“He was putting together a group and asked me if I wanted to play, and I thought, 'I’m new at this school, and this will help me meet some new people,'” she said. “I like to play different characters and play different story lines and see what they are like.”

In addition to Dungeons & Dragons, Resnick was also interested in theater.

Theater and D&D role-playing came magically together in Qui Nguyen’s play She Kills Monsters, which the Ann Arbor Civic Theatre will present March 12-15 at the Arthur Miller Theatre, with Resnick directing.

During an intro to playwriting class at Michigan State University seven years ago, Cole Hunter Dzubak found inspiration for his first play, Afterall, in an unlikely source: Oasis’ 1995 megahit "Wonderwall."

Given a prompt from his professor to write a play based on an existing piece of media, Dzubak said he ran with the idea of deconstructing what have become different interpretations of the song, repurposing them in his own story.

Originally believed to be a story about songwriter Noel Gallagher’s then-girlfriend and future wife, Gallagher later corrected the record that "Wonderwall" was actually a song about an imaginary friend “who's gonna come and save you from yourself."

Dzubak’s obsession with the song and its two supposed meanings made him realize what he had to do.

“Afterall is really about that idea of those two interpretations of the song kind of being pitted against one another, and it forces the main character to pick: imaginary friends or love of his life,” Dzubak said.

After years of tinkering, Dzubak and Ypsilanti’s Neighborhood Theatre Group will debut Afterall as its latest production, with shows set for February 27 through March 1 and March 6-8 at the Back Office Studio in Ypsilanti.

An older nun’s hard “certainty” pushes against a popular, easy-going priest in John Patrick Shanley’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play Doubt, A Parable.

When the play was first staged in 2004, it drew on the sexual scandals in the Catholic church and the very real doubts about the line between compassion and transgression.

PTD Productions is staging Doubt, A Parable Feb. 13-15 and 18-21 at the Riverside Arts Center in Ypsilanti.

The play opens with Father Flynn presenting his Sunday homily to the congregation. His theme is doubt, and like Jesus, he uses parables to make abstract ideas easy to understand.

“Doubt can be a bond as powerful and sustaining as certainty,” he tells his congregation.

Director Josiah Jackson writes in his director’s note of the play's theme, “It’s a story much simpler and smaller than our real world, a fictional place where one could find certainty, wrapped in a nice package with a crisp bow on top, but that is not what this story does. Instead of offering certainty, this play asks us to consider that doubt is, in fact, not something to run from, but rather to embrace.”

After Richard Johnson retired as print editor for Crain Communications’ Automotive News, he used his automobile creds to work on a play about the history of the Ford Motor Company after World War II.

He met with Jeff Daniels, founder and artistic director of Chelsea's Purple Rose Theatre, about staging his play. Daniels told Johnson his play about Lee Iacocca at Ford was too big and asked him, “What do you know?” Johnson replied, “I’ve been writing about the automotive industry for 35 years. I know cars.”

Johnson understood Daniels' suggestion and began again with a different car story. It wasn’t a story about auto executives, hotshot designers, or top-drawer new-car dealerships. 

The result is The Classic King, Johnson’s beautifully detailed comedy-drama set in a used-car shop. It's at The Purple Rose Theatre through March 15.

Well, she used to have a carefree mind of her own
And a delicate look in her eye
These days, I'm afraid, she's not even sure
If her name is Veronica
—Elvis Costello, "Veronica," 1989

Memory loss is a slow burn.

For the patients who gradually lose their recollections in the smoldering fog.

And for the families and friends who watch their loved ones disappear while still being present physically.

It's the type of illness that inspires rumination because of its creeping progression, and two creative projects that reflect on dementia and its impacts are coming to Ann Arbor.

Playwright Jordan Hall opens Kayak with a woman floating down a river. Annie Iverson is afraid, unable to navigate her boat properly or use a GPS to figure out where she is. So, instead, she stacks a s’more (her only food) and begins to share her woes.

She’s got a lot to complain about, but mostly she’s concerned about her son and his relationship with this “awful” girlfriend who goes around the world trying to save the environment and leads “dangerous” rallies and gives loud and angry speeches. Why, she wonders, can’t her son find a nice girl who will one day give her grandchildren?

Theatre NOVA’s production of Kayak seems to have chosen just the right play to perform at just the right moment. Events in American cities and around the world are making people wonder what their obligations are in troubled times.

Naming All the Flowers I Could (NAF) is a multidisciplinary artists' association at the University of Michigan that supports the work of queer and female creators.

Founded in 2023 by Maddie Vassalo and Miles Hionis, NAF hatched the idea for a festival celebrating queer and female artists after attending the winter 2025 U-M School of Music, Theatre, and Dance's Performing Arts EXCELerator entrepreneurial fellowship program. NAF refined its plans for the fest, then submitted a proposal to U-M Stamps School of Art & Design's 2025 Big Idea Award.

NAF was awarded $25,000, and the All the Flowers Festival started to bloom.

According to a press release from NAF, All the Flowers Festival exists to "cultivate a community of like-minded artists and collaborators, forging new avenues for queer and female artists to tell their authentic stories and create work outside of traditional theater and film industry pathways. This plan included the idea for a festival as a showcase for queer and female theater makers, filmmakers, and performers to bring their work to the public, and to strengthen connections between University of Michigan programs."

All the Flowers Festival takes place at two U-M venues on North Campus—the Duderstadt Video Studio and Arthur Miller Theater—from Wednesday, February 4, to Saturday, February 7.

Here is the full list of performances:

An MLive headline on January 10 may have caused the heart rates of local theater fans to spike for a second:

"96-year-old Ann Arbor theater hopes to continue despite lease nearing its end"

The article discusses the history of Ann Arbor Civic Theatre (A2CT) and the difficulties that this scrappy troupe, which started in 1929, has faced in recent years:

Theater is communal by nature, with different departments—costumes, set design, acting—coming together to create something of artistic value.

But Ann Arbor's Forge Theater is built entirely on community.

Creatives become members to gain access to the space; once their productions and performances are ready to go, Forge supports the artists with ticketing, marketing, and house management duties, among other things. (Nonmembers can also rent the space, but members get a discount and additional support.)

The idea for Forge Theater came from the mind of local theater vet Catherine Zudak, but its success will be the result of artists rallying around the plan.

The collaborative studio space on Packard Street soft-launched in the fall, and it recently announced its initial 2026 performances.

The Ann Arbor Civic Theater was planning to stage Stephen Karam’s Tony Award-winning Thanksgiving play The Humans just before the holiday. But first, there was a Halloween play of an off-beat Dracula comedy that had to be produced.

The Humans' director Cassie Mann said there wasn’t enough time to squeeze in the play for Thanksgiving. So instead of opening the holiday season, The Humans is winding up the holiday season with a play that combines drama, humor, and a chance to reflect on the meaning of our holiday gatherings.

“I saw it on Broadway in 2016 in its first original run, and I just loved it,” Mann said. “I kept thinking about it, and Broadway prices what they were, I wasn’t about to go back and see it again, but I just kept thinking about it, and I thought I would love to do this at some time.”

Karam’s play deftly captures the tensions of an ordinary family on that very important holiday, a mixture of tension, humor, and love.