For a while, Ethan was doing great in Chicago. He had a good job, a relationship that seemed strong, and was embracing the freedoms that a big city offers. Then the job, the relationship, and the big city merged to create a breakdown. It was time to go home to Ann Arbor.

Theatre Nova is presenting the world premiere of playwright Robert Axelrod’s Dry Summer. It’s a sensitive play about depression, alcohol abuse, and family relations. But it’s also a play that balances drama with humor, emotional pain with a determination to forge ahead.

The Purple Rose Theatre Company’s new revival production of Jeff Daniels’ comedy Norma & Wanda, first staged in Chelsea 20 years ago, has a notably self-aware coda: an upbeat recorded cast announcement that brings the actors bounding back onto the stage, similar to that of a “recorded in front of a live studio audience” sitcom curtain call.

Frankly, nothing could be more apt for the slapstick-y Norma & Wanda. The play aims to be an over-the-top romp with loads of physical comedy and double entendres. It tells the story of the titular sisters: Norma (Kristin Shields), who’s frantically decorating her home for the holidays while also making peanut butter balls for the Baby Jesus Memorial Christmas Brunch; and Wanda (Jamie Elvey), the crass, unlucky-in-love sister who’s seething about being stood up yet again.

But whether you do more laughing or wincing, well, that will depend on how funny you find a woman repeatedly summoning her cat by yelling, “Where’s my Pussy?” and if the phrase “peanut butter balls” makes you giggle.

It’s October, so many of us are in the mood for a good ghost story, and you needn’t look any further than Penny Seats Theatre Company’s The Woman in Black.

Never heard of it? Neither had I. But it’s based on a 1983 novel by British author Susan Hill, and Stephen Mallatratt adapted it for the stage a few years later.

With a cast of three, who play a multitude of characters, The Woman in Black went on to become the second-longest running non-musical play in London’s West End—second only to Agatha Christie’s stalwart The Mousetrap—and a 2012 feature film adaptation starred Daniel Radcliffe.

“Several Michigan companies have mounted the show, all with vastly different takes on it,” said Penny Seats’ executive director Lauren London. “One of the most fun things about this show is the number of ways it can be interpreted.”

As London describes it, the two main characters are an actor and a man who wishes to convey to his family and friends, with the actor’s help, a traumatic experience he suffered.

The University of Michigan School of Music, Theatre and Dance is taking over The Encore Theatre stage this weekend and next for a play that director Sydney Morton calls tailor-made for U-M students.

She Loves Me, with book by Joe Masteroff, music by Jerry Bock, and lyrics by Sheldon Harnick, is a musical adaptation of a play by Hungarian playwright Miklos Laszlo. The play has been the source for the 1940s movies Shop Around the Corner and The Good Old Summertime, and was the inspiration for You’ve Got Mail.

She Loves Me is the story of two star-crossed lovers who have never met but exchange heartfelt love letters. But the musical is also about the people at Mr. Maraczek’s very successful parfumerie in Budapest. Everyone has a story, a song, a dance. The play is about a work family in which each character has a story.

Director Morton writes that the play has many connections to U-M, including lyricist Sheldon Harnick’s friendship with the Musical Theatre Emeritus Chair, Brent Wagner. But, until now, the musical has never been produced by the university.

The Kander and Ebb musical Cabaret takes place in Berlin's Kit Kat Klub. As an MC runs the show, an American writer, Clifford Bradshaw, and an English cabaret performer, Sally Bowles, become romantically involved.

But Cabaret is decidedly not a rom-com: The musical transpires in 1929-30, as the Nazis rise to power.

The University of Michigan will present Cabaret from October 3-12 at the Lydia Mendelssohn Theatre.

“What drew me to Cabaret had very little to do with Sally Bowles,” wrote Harold Prince, who directed the first production on Broadway in 1966. “What attracted the authors and me was the parallel between the spiritual bankruptcy of Germany in the 1920s and our country in the 1960s. The assassinations of Martin Luther King and Medgar Evers, the march on Selma, the murder of the three young men, Goodman, Chaney and Schwerner.”

Joe Masteroff’s book for Cabaret was based on a play, John Van Druten’s I Am a Camera, which in turn was based on a 1939 movie, Goodbye to Berlin by Christopher Isherwood.

A musical about the rise of Nazism in Germany might seem an unlikely candidate for success. Yet it won eight Tony Awards and has been restaged many times, sometimes without a political overlay, sometimes reflecting whatever the problems society was experiencing at the time.

This production, under the direction of André Garner with music direction by Catherine A. Walker, speaks to our country today.

The University of Michigan Department of Theatre and Drama had slotted playwright Braden Jacobs-Jenkins' play Gloria months ago. Recent events attach a new urgency to a play that begins as comedy and becomes something very different.

Gloria is being presented through October 5 at the Arthur Miller Theatre on the university’s north campus.

Jacobs-Jenkins has won numerous awards for his plays, including back-to-back Tony awards for his plays Appropriate and Purpose. In 2016, Gloria was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.

The setting is the office of a prestigious Manhattan magazine (think The New Yorker, where Jacobs-Jenkins spent some time), circa the 2010s. Every year, young people with big ambitions flow into New York City. They’ve got ideas, they’ve got manuscripts, and they’ve got a low-paying job at a stylish magazine that really doesn’t care about hopes and dreams.

The play begins as these employees on the fringe wander in. It seems they don’t have all that much to do, and what they do isn’t all that important, so they spend a lot of time complaining, haranguing, and playing games with each other (think The Office).

The back and forth is funny and something that most people understand: the frustrations of a dead-end job.

A roundup of recent Washtenaw County arts and culture stories from local media outlets Life in Michigan, WEMU, Concentrate, Current, Ann Arbor Observer, WCBN, The Sun New Times, The Saline Post, and Ann Arbor City Lifestyle. 

George and Charlotte used to be the toast of Broadway back in the day. Now it’s the 1950s, and they’re still performing in New York ... Buffalo, New York.

Playwright Ken Ludwig’s Moon Over Buffalo is the story of a marriage on the rocks, careers reduced in their minds to traveling theater shows far from the Big Apple and other big cities, and the occasional movie role—bad B-movies, of course. 

But Moon Over Buffalo is a comedy!

PTD Productions is presenting the play, directed by Daniel Dye, through August 23 at Riverside Arts Center in Ypsilanti.

Dye has been performing on stage in several area theaters; now he’s directing for the first time. The rookie director gives a stellar performance behind the scenes, too, as he knows how to handle a show that combines everything from slapstick to shifting romances to excellently handled farce.

In his director’s note, Dye writes about the importance of stories, the stories we tell each other, and the stories that good writers tell us.

“We had a conventional way of what it meant to craft a story and share it. However, certain playwrights and authors bent those conventions in different ways. That is when the world was shown something new,” Dye writes.

For generations, people from all over the country have moved to New York City for a fresh start—the chance to plant themselves in a densely packed, busy place where no one knows their story, and they can start writing a new one, and maybe even realize a dream.

But there’s also an inherent risk: What if no one in this teeming city cares to know your story, old or new, and instead of becoming known in a new place, you simply stay invisible?

Adam Gwon’s Ordinary Days—staged by Penny Seats Theatre Company at Cahoots—is a sung-through chamber musical focusing on four New Yorkers: Warren (Henry Ballesteros), an optimistic aspiring artist who is house- and cat-sitting for an artist jailed for vandalism; Deb (Kristin McSweeney Kelly), a cynical graduate student who’s struggling with her thesis about Virginia Woolf; and Jason (Michael Bessom) and Claire (Katrin Murdock), a couple weathering their differences after moving in together.

There is a movement in the United States to reach out to people in other countries through person-to-person contact. The intention is to develop empathy for other people, other cultures, and other points of view. The idea is admirable, but “empathy” is not always the same for everyone.

Playwright David Wells’ Radical Empathy is a challenging look at that movement through the relationship of an American couple and an Iraqi couple during the conflict between U.S. forces and ISIS from 2011 to 2018. Wells has found a perfect theater for his thought-provoking play at Ann Arbor’s Theatre Nova, a small theater with big ambitions.

A TED Talk lecturer gives an emotional, riveting, and eventually viral lecture on radical empathy. He challenges his audience to imagine how Americans would feel if, in the past, China had taken control of American coal, China had prospered, and Americans had fallen into poverty except for the richest citizens. He then brought the argument to the present—2011—and the United States is prosperous, but the Iraqi people are caught in a seemingly endless series of conflicts with the United States while also dealing with internal forces.

The lecture draws the attention of an Iraqi man. He is middle-class, unhappy with life under the control of ISIS, and wants to learn more about Radical Empathy. He writes to the lecturer, and a person-to-person conversation begins that also includes the wives of the two men.