“History teaches me things that get undone can get rebuilt…. There are people who will not tolerate the things that we’ve all tolerated for so long, that have been harmful in our culture. And art, people’s stories, the fact that storytelling is changing and more stories are being told from more cultural perspectives, that gives me a lot of hope, and I want to see more of it.” — Dominique Morrisseau
Dominique Morisseau is a renowned playwright. Born in 1978 Detroit, Morisseau grew up in a vibrant city with a unique, rich history and fell in love with everything her hometown had to offer. Throughout her childhood, Morisseau immersed herself in the performing arts, including dance, acting, and spoken word. While studying acting at the University of Michigan, Morisseau became aware just how severely the mainstream arts lacked representation of the Black experience. “I went to study acting,” she has said. “But I was so genuinely frustrated with the lack of roles for Black students and for Black women in particular…. I started to feel small, something I never felt growing up in Detroit.”
This need for more representation of Black women inspired Morisseau to write her first play: The Blackness Blues: Time to Change the Tune (A Sister’s Story). This three-person play for Black women provided Morisseau and her peers in the BFA program a chance to showcase their talents. It was a defining moment in Morisseau’s college experience, proving that she had the gift to create roles and other opportunities for Black artists and empower marginalized artists, including herself. It set her on a new path.
Morisseau used what she had learned in college to become a storyteller and advocate for her hometown of Detroit, which needs all the counternarratives it can get in a wider culture that speaks down to it. “When I go other places, like every Detroiter,” she says, “what we hear is a different version of our city than the one we experienced. We hear a media version, a Detroit that was dangerous and violent…. What they don’t know is how much vibrant culture there is in Detroit, how much art, and how much social consciousness there is in the city….”
As a playwright, Dominique wanted to use her artistry to show the rest of the world the humanity of Detroit that often goes unnoticed or is overlooked. When writing about the Black characters in her plays in a way that felt truthful and humane, Dominique drew from her inspirations—playwrights Pearl Cleage, Alice Childress, Lorraine Hansberry, Ntozake Shange, and August Wilson. In a 2015 interview about the genesis of The Detroit Project—a three-play cycle set across 50 years of American history—Morisseau said, “I was really enamored with the musicality in [Wilson’s] work and I also thought, ‘Wow, how must people of Pittsburgh feel when they read August Wilson’s work? They must feel so loved and so affirmed.’ I want to do that for my city.” Dominique has made this one of her missions as a playwright and in doing so, she has given the people of her hometown something to make them feel seen, proud, and appreciated.
The three plays of The Detroit Project are Detroit ’67, Paradise Blue, and Skeleton Crew. Each perceptively captures the power and beauty of Detroit’s Black communities through three different, historically significant time periods that molded the city’s culture and sociopolitical climate. Detroit ‘67 (2013) is about siblings running a business and working to survive financial burdens during an important time for Motown music and civil unrest in the country. Skeleton Crew (2016) is set in 2008 during the Great Recession and tells the story of a small group of auto-plant workers whose jobs are in jeopardy due to the country’s economic downturn. Paradise Blue (2015) is set in 1949 in the thriving Paradise Valley neighborhood of Detroit, as gentrification and “slum clearance” comes for a set of characters associated with a night club. (Read more about The Detroit Cycle here.)
Following The Detroit Project, Morisseau notably authored Ain’t Too Proud: The Life and Times of The Temptations. In 2017, this musical premiered at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre. Two years later, Ain’t Too Proud opened on Broadway and was nominated for 12 Tony Awards. This enthralling jukebox musical, set in Detroit, takes audiences through a remarkable journey of the origin story of The Temptations, the turmoil they experienced as a group as they fought to navigate civil unrest, and their ascent to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.
Morisseau’s work also stretches outside of Detroit. Mud Row (2021) is both the title of Morisseau’s play and name that has often been negatively used to describe the east-end neighborhood of West Chester, Pennsylvania where the play is set. When talking to the residents of this neighborhood to write the story, Morisseau explained that, “It was the pride of the people that reminded me of my hometown...Because our communities across the nation, and the diaspora, are not so disconnected. We are all in need of the same things — respect for the land that we built, and honoring the people that sacrificed for us to have a sense of home.” Mud Row is a powerful story about Black sisterhood and generational, family conflict pertaining to race, class, and relationships.
Other works from Morisseau include Pipeline (2017, Studio Theatre 2020) which follows a woman who works as a public school teacher while battling to keep her privately educated son from the school-to-prison pipeline. Confederates (2022) delves even further into conversations about race, class, and gender in the American education system. In an interview with Playbill, Morisseau declared that with Confederates, “I’m definitely putting my finger…maybe even my fist, right all up in the chin of the attack on critical race theory…. I’m definitely taking a very strong and bold stance about the foundation of white supremacy in this country and in this country’s institutions.” The play follows two Black women: an enslaved rebel woman and a present-day professor at a predominantly white university. Lines between the past and the present blur as both characters confront racism and sexism in their “respective institutions,” and fight for liberation.
Morisseau’s vast achievements do not stop at writing plays. She has worked on multiple TV/film projects, including co-producing the Netflix hit series Shameless. Morisseau has also developed projects with major TV/film companies, such as FX, A24, and Warner Bros.
Through her extensive body of work, Morisseau advocates for those who have been marginalized; she shows their humanity through music, humor, and interpersonal relationships that are truthful and relatable to many, even when it comes to telling stories of the past. In a 2018 interview with NPR, Morisseau said, “Everything about 1963, '64, '65 could be mirrored right now — which is scary, but it's also profound that art gets to do that, to catch up to the time and give us a way of looking at something differently.” Morisseau’s heartfelt, forceful, and poetic writing has challenged the types of narratives we see onstage, illuminated the stories of the oppressed, and amplified the voices of those that have been suppressed for far too long.
— Niara Richards