Tagged: theatre

Frannie Shepherd-Bates is a Shakespeare geek. She is also executive artistic director of the Magenta Giraffe Theatre Company in Detroit.

Twice a week, Shepherd-Bates drives from metro Detroit to the Women’s Huron Valley Correctional Facility, which is about 10 miles south of Ann Arbor, to share her love of Shakespeare.

It's a familiar Michigan story. In 2008, General Motors decided to shutter a stamping plant in Wyoming - just outside Grand Rapids.

But to Austin Bunn, a new professor of writing at Grand Valley State University, the close of the plant wasn't the end of a story, but a beginning.

For the next four years, Bunn interviewed the workers at the plant about the experience of job loss, displacement and their lives after the close.

From these transcripts he created a documentary play, RUST. It was originally produced at the Actors' Theatre of Grand Rapids.

What you're about to hear is adaptation of the play for radio using local actors.

RUST was co-produced by Austin Bunn and Zak Rosen. Interviews conducted by Austin Bunn and Working Group Theatre. Featured actors include Tracey Walker, Rena Dam, Chris Nye, Wayne Swezey, GF Korreck, Paul Arnold, Fred Stella, and Laurence Drozd.

You can learn more about the Actors' Theatre of Grand Rapids and Austin Bunn's work by visiting their websites.

Listen to the full audio above.

A group from Washington DC is hoping to get elementary, middle and high school students excited about playwrighting.

The group is called The Young Playwright's Theatre and the leaders of this program are launching a four-city tour, starting in Detroit.

It's aim is to reach out to key education figures about spreading the Young Playwright's Theatre model to classrooms across the nation.

Executive director of the Young Playwright's Theatre Brigitte Pribnow Moore and artist director Nicole Jost joined us on Stateside to tell us more about their Michigan tour.

To listen to the full story click the audio link above.

Members of the Royal Shakespeare Company are back in Ann Arbor, but they won’t be performing any of the classics while they’re in town.

The RSC is doing a “creative residency” at U of M this month, which means they'll focus on the development of two new plays - "Boris Godunov,” and “The Orphan of Zhao."

U of M English Professor Ralph Williams says the residency allows students to get an insight into the creative process, and a sense of what he calls “possible excellence." Here's how he describes it:

Students in Flint have written a new play inspired by the string of arson fires that plagued the city last year.

Students at the University of Michigan-Flint spent a good part of the this year interviewing victims of the arson fires that ripped through the city in 2010. The students then transcribed the interviews and strung them together to create a new play called EMBERS: The Flint Fires Verbatim Theatre Project.

The Mosaic Youth Theatre of Detroit will perform a play this weekend to commemorate the anniversary of a student walkout at Detroit Public Schools.