The annual Michigan Playwrights Festival, created and hosted by Theatre NOVA, will be held from Aug. 13 to Aug. 16, featuring four professionally acted and directed staged readings. The festival aims to support local writers and invite audiences into learning more about plays and the process behind them.
“I am really passionate about uplifting new plays, new playwrights and the artists that make them,” producing artist director and lead festival producer Shelby Seeley said. “It felt like a natural fit for me to start working at Theatre NOVA.”
The festival focuses on Michigan playwrights and Michigan work specifically, so it is a great opportunity for the community to come out and encourage their local artists.
“It’s just a wonderful reminder of the talent and the skill level and the stories that Michigan artists are passionate about and are creating,” Seeley said.
The Sanctuary by Ann E. Eskridge
Writer Ann E. Eskridge discovered her love for playwriting through her initial job as a reporter and screenwriter.
“I understood cuts, dissolves, all of the lingo that screenwriters need in order to develop a script,” Eskridge said. “Over a period of time, not only was I interested in screenwriting, but I also was interested in playwriting.”
The play is based on a woman in Detroit who built a sanctuary out of junk for 10 years. Over time, the neighbors began to complain and the city decided to tear it down, creating controversy within the art community.
“When I read the story, I thought ‘Wow, what would happen if a kid needed to believe that this person had built a sanctuary to house the souls of dead folks,’” Eskridge said. “That’s initially how I got the story and wrote it into a book, and this play is adapted from the book.”
Eskridge then went to the Children’s Center in Detroit and asked to develop a grief and bereavement program that was inspired by the story. By working with art therapists, kids who were handling grief were able to create art projects as a memorial to their loved ones.
“There needs to be a response to a child’s grief,” Eskridge said. “It can help if children are able to somehow express that grief and create something that they symbolize as part of their loved one.”
The Sanctuary will be read on stage on Aug. 13 at 8 p.m.
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Cakewalk by Kenndall Wallace
Playwright and producer Kenndall Wallace became involved with playwriting during her sophomore year of college.
“I kind of started writing plays and the more I did it, the more I fell in love with it,” Wallace said. “I was directing people in the theater landscape and figuring out how to make good stories.”
The play is a dramatic period piece, consisting of three characters and mainly inspired by the Jim Crow Museum in Big Rapids.
“I was actually researching for another play and I came across their website with articles on the history of Jim Crow in America,” Wallace said. “It really kind of inspired me to make a play about what was going on around that same time.”
Wallace believes playwriting to be a unique form of art that is able to bring actors and the audience together.
“It’s very much a connection, very much a bearing of the soul, not only just from a playwriting perspective, but from an acting perspective,” Wallace said. “I think [there’s] something very innately personal about theater that really differentiates itself from other mediums of storytelling.”
Wallace also runs an arts collective in Detroit, known as the Late Fee Collective, which aims to increase arts literacy among young people and people of color. Find out more on their Instagram page, @latefeecollective.
Cakewalk will be read on stage on Aug. 14 at 8 p.m.
ASHE by Krystle Dellihue
Actor and playwright Krystle Dellihue began playwriting as a way to get her feelings out about issues that felt important to her.
“I’ve always been interested in historical pieces and the first thing I wrote was a story about Hattie McDaniel,” Dellihue said. “From there, [I’ve just been] looking for more things to address, like social justice or historical stories that haven’t been told on stage.”
The original idea behind this play came from the passing of Chadwick Boseman and how the public reacted to his physical appearance and health. Dellihue believes that no one’s health is anyone’s business but their own. A post about tennis player Arthur Ashe mentioned a conversation between him and a friend, Doug Smith, that involved telling the public about the status of Ashe’s health.
“Him and Doug had known each other since they were young children,” Dellihue said. “But for your friend to come to you and say, ‘Hey, our newspaper knows you have this debilitating disease and we’re going to go public,’… It started out me wanting to just dramatize that conversation between Doug and Arthur, but then I started to find out more about his marriage and the other people in his life, which kind of filled out the story.”
Dellihue believes playwriting serves a special role as our world becomes increasingly modern.
“In this day and age, a lot of books or courses are being taken out of schools,” Dellihue said. “So I think playwrights have a huge opportunity right now to put things on the stage, where people have free reign and the government really doesn’t have a say.”
ASHE will be read on stage on Aug. 15 at 8 p.m.
Dispersion by Joël Henning Doty
Playwright Joël Henning Doty has been writing plays for about 15 years, though her journey with writing did not start out with them.
“I tried writing screenplays for a while. But it’s a different kind of writing that requires a lot of visuals,” Doty said. “And then playwriting, when I started doing that, I realized it was all about dialogue. And that seems to be what I like the best and what I do the best.”
The play is about a mother who is in a coma, but can only talk to the audience and her nurse/angel. She overhears the discussions between her children and realizes that the secret she kept is stopping them from moving on with their lives, and the play explores what the mother decides to do after that.
“I like family dynamics and I write a lot about family dynamics,” Doty said. “I was also interested in what happens when people can keep secrets from each other.”
Doty believes plays are very unique in the sense that the audience experiences the actors, but the actors also experience the audience, creating an interesting back-and-forth dynamic.
“Theater is a wonderful way of expressing what’s going on in the world at any given time,” Doty said. “The fact that people experience [plays] together makes it a really nice and very unique artistic form.”
Dispersion will be read on stage on Aug. 16 at 2 p.m.
