Putting Detroit’s Finest in Detroit Public Theater

But it is only in the last year that her works have made their way to the city that inspired them. With help from the Detroit Historical Society and the Knight Foundation, the theater’s roving production of “Detroit ’67” has traveled to museums, high schools and community centers in the metropolitan region.

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“Detroit ’67” is one of three plays inspired by the city; “Paradise Blue,” the second, about an arts-rich African-American neighborhood demolished at midcentury for freeway construction, will be produced at the Signature Theater Company in Manhattan in the spring.

“Skeleton Crew,” the final work in the trilogy, centers on the closing of an automobile plant and its impact on four workers during the 2008 recession. It runs through Oct. 29 at the Detroit Public Theater’s 150-seat space inside the Fisher Music Center; the Detroit Free Press described it as “maybe the best play you’ll see this year.”

The theater was founded in 2015 by Courtney Burkett, a native of the city who had worked in theater here and in New York; Sarah Clare Corporandy, who also serves as managing director at Chautauqua Theater Company in upstate New York, but returned here for this challenge; and Sarah Winkler, a native New Yorker with more than two decades as an actress and producer Off Broadway, who moved here when her husband took a job in Michigan. All three share the title producing artistic director.

“We felt like there was not an anchor for theater serving the city,’’ Ms. Burkett explained, noting the presence of major cultural institutions like the Detroit Symphony Orchestra and Detroit Institute of Arts.

A theater like this “could not have existed 10 years ago,” she added. “Now that the city’s stabilizing and even thriving in so many ways, our artists are also thriving and getting the attention they always deserved.”

Among the challenges is ensuring that, as white women, they remain connected to a city that is more than 80 percent black. (Matrix Theater Company and the African-American focused Plowshares Theater Company both have long histories here.)

In an email, Ms. Corporandy said: “Producing theater in a city that is predominantly African-American means we need to make sure that our stories speak to everyone, to the public we want to serve.”

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“We are also very aware of the privilege we come to the table with,” she added, “and we want to be sure that we are leveraging that privilege to give back to this city that we all love, not take from it.”

The Detroit Public Theater annual budget is a relatively modest $1 million; its costs include renting space inside the symphony’s hall. The leaders hope to raise enough money to have a permanent home eventually; in the meantime, they believe that showing work like Ms. Morisseau’s is vital to the theater’s becoming better known to Detroiters, suburbanites, and visitors intrigued by the city’s much-touted comeback.

This playwright was a natural choice for the inaugural 2015-16 season, according to Ms. Burkett. (It presented “Detroit ’67” in a coproduction with Baltimore Center Stage.) And the leaders intend to bring other Michigan artists into the fold, including the playwright Noah Haidle, whose “Birthday Candles” will have its world premiere as the final show this season.

Debbie Erb, the chairwoman of the theater’s board, said leaders want to keep the shows “really accessible.” Ticket prices top out at $45, with group and student discounts and pay as you go options during previews.

Another goal is to “keep actors who are from the Detroit area in Detroit,” Ms. Erb said. “Because why should they have to go to Chicago or New York to earn a decent living?”

Ms. Morisseau admits that until recently she was better known outside her hometown than inside. “Even starting from Detroit,” she said, “local theaters didn’t know who I was until really, really huge things happened for me.”

Clearly that is changing. Ella Joyce, a Detroit native now living in Los Angeles, plays Faye, the lead character in “Skeleton Crew.” She was excited to return for the role. “I don’t think Dominique is just Detroit’s greatest playwright,’’ she said on opening night. “I think she is one of America’s greatest playwrights.”

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Ms. Joyce said friends from grade school turned up at performances of the play and came up to speak with her afterward, even bringing childhood photos to remind her who they were.

Writing about the people of Detroit, particularly African-Americans, is crucial to Ms. Morisseau’s work. And while she now lives in Los Angeles, serving on the writing staff of Showtime’s “Shameless,” she believes her work brings Detroiters alive, especially when it is performed by local actors.

“Something kind of magic and organic comes out of the mouth of a native Detroiter when they’re saying my words,’’ she said. “It’s like we speak the same language.”

Earlier this month Ms. Morisseau came to see “Skeleton Crew” with her husband and an entourage of dozens, including her mother, who still lives in Detroit.

“When you are sitting around with half your family that inspired your work, it’s profound and exciting, but it is also overwhelming because these are the people that know it best and that live it,” she said.

It’s for this reason that Ms. Morisseau is not only glad to see her work produced inside the theater, but brought to the public as well.

“Asking communities from all over to not just go to midtown or downtown Detroit to see shows, but come out to the neighborhood where what happened in these neighborhoods happened to someone you know,’’ she said.

“That to me has power, in the best way, to affirm, to vindicate, to humanize and to heal.”

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