October 7 - 23, 2011
NUTS
by Tom Topor
Directed by Artistic Director Milt Zoth

A Broadway hit, Nuts has been called the best courtroom melodrama since Witness for the Prosecution and The Caine Mutiny Court Martial. Set in a courtroom in New York’s Bellevue Hospital, the story follows a high-priced call girl incarcerated on a charge for killing a violent “john”. The State, represented by a court appointed psychiatrist and an aggressive prosecutor, say Claudia Faith Draper is unfit to stand trial. As testimony from experts, physicians and her parents unfolds, with her psyche and childhood dissected, she proves to the judge that she isn’t “nuts” and stands legally sane at trial for manslaughter.

November 4-20, 2011
PALMER PARK
by Joanna McClelland Glass
Directed by Ron Himes

Joanna McClelland Glass’s play centers on five couples in the Detroit neighborhood of Palmer Park following the race riots of 1967. Their integrated lives are threatened when the high performing neighborhood school is forced to accept children from an adjacent working-class neighborhood. Racial harmony and friendships are changed forever with very sad and very real consequences.
History Museum-Co-Production with the Black Rep

December 2 - 18
My Three Angels
by Samuel and Bella Spewack
Directed by Elizabeth Helman PhD

Christmas Eve and it’s only 105 degrees in the shade. Welcome to French Guiana where paroled convicts from the local penal colony move about with relative freedom. What we soon learn is that on the outside it is often very hard to tell who the real criminals are. Sometimes the only difference between freemen and those from the Bastille is that the incarcerated have been caught and prosecuted for their crimes. My Three Angels takes a warm, witty and romantic look at our long-standing moral convictions of what is right and wrong. We are taught that good must surely and always triumph over evil. But as is the case in our story, does the end always justify the means? This you will have to decide for yourself as our felonious triumvirate intervenes in the lives of an innocent family which is now perched on the brink of financial ruin. Proficient in the illicit skills of theft, forgery, extortion and yes, even murder, our unlikely heroes arrive in timely fashion to remind us all of what is truly most important. An honest appreciation of life, love and the simple serenity of domestic bliss. An old fashioned and wonderfully crafted fable to take home for the holidays!

April 6 - 22, 2012
Killer Joe
by Tracy Letts
Directed by Artistic Director Milt Zoth

The plot is set spinning within the first few minutes, Letts taking little time setting the scene. That scene is a trailer in a Texas park inhabited by the revolting Smith family. Young Chris Smith needs to get hold of $6000 or his creditors will kill him. With his father Ansel he decides to murder his mother for what, he has been told, is a sizeable life insurance policy. They agree to hire Joe Cooper, a police detective with a sideline in contract killing.

This is a truly wonderful play, inhabiting Tennessee Williams territory both geographically and emotionally.

June 1 - 17, 2012 One Flew over A Cuckoo’s Nest
by Dale Wasserman/based on the novel by Ken Kesey

McMurphy, a man with several assault convictions to his name, finds himself in jail once again. This time, the charge is statutory rape when it turns out that his girlfriend had lied about being eighteen, and was, in fact, fifteen (or, as McMurphy puts it, “fifteen going on thirty-five”). Rather than spend his time in jail, he convinces the guards that he’s crazy enough to need psychiatric care and is sent to a hospital. He fits in frighteningly well, and his different point of view actually begins to cause some of the patients to progress. Nurse Ratched becomes his personal cross to bear as his resistance to the hospital routine gets on her nerves.