DiscPlus: Muse of Detroit

Writer and playwright Dominique Morisseau is directing her first film in her hometown of Detroit. // Photographs courtesy of Dominique/Paradigm Talent Agency

Story by Tom Murray/DBusiness

Actress and playwright Dominique Morisseau has written at least nine plays on an ever-growing list, three of which comprise what she calls her Detroit Project.

In 2018, she was awarded the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship — also known as the Genius Grant — and more recently she was nominated for a Tony Award for her work as the book writer of the Broadway musical “Ain’t Too Proud — The Life and Times of the Temptations.”

Her frequent collaborator, Kamilah Forbes, the director and executive producer at Harlem’s storied Apollo Theater, says of Morisseau: “She writes plays that carry pieces and threads and glimpses of people who have raised her, who she loves and cares for fiercely.”

Morisseau’s uncanny ability to capture the voices and emotions of the subjects in her plays can be traced back to her earliest days in the Marygrove neighborhood on Detroit’s west side.

“I grew up at Six Mile and Livernois, and I always felt very comfortable in my neighborhood,” she says. “The families all knew each other, and a lot of the kids on the block would always come over to our house to play basketball or double-Dutch. I had a very happy childhood in Detroit.”

Morisseau’s mother spent 40 years teaching in nearby Highland Park, she says. Her father, meanwhile, “wasn’t an educator, but he did a lot of educating of people in the family.”

Morisseau pauses here, then laughs softly at her subtle joke, adding: “He was a political science major and a mathematical genius and a scholar who was very much a part of the computer engineering world — computer technology and computer science.

“He had a stroke when I was really young, and he ended up not being able to work. But he took care of a lot of kids on our block. Our home was sort of like the stable home in the neighborhood.”

Growing up, Morisseau performed in plays at her father’s church.

“I had an aunt who was a dancer,” she says. “She started the Detroit Dance Center, and I grew up dancing with her. So there was always the performing, and I had theater too. My family took me to see plays.”

Morisseau was always inspired to write about what she was seeing and hearing around her.
“I don’t remember a pivotal moment in which I knew I was a writer,” she says. “Writing is something I’ve always done since I was a child. It just was always in my wheelhouse and it was always encouraged of me, and I don’t know that I have a good answer for how I developed my ear.”

She readily gives credit to her education, which her parents prioritized. Morisseau attended Bates Academy, a public magnet school near Eight Mile Road and Wyoming, and it was there that she first caught the acting and performing bug.

“That happened as early as second grade, when we were doing plays,” she says, giggling. “That’s the first time I remember wanting to be in a play, and not getting the role I wanted. But I stayed with it.

“Then, in sixth grade, a teacher brought plays to class every semester. She was the first person to really affirm that I was a performer for the stage, and it was something I could think about pursuing. And everybody speaks highly of Mrs. Willie Bell Gibson, who is probably Bates Academy’s most noted teacher.

“Language arts was her thing, and she had us way ahead of the game. Being in her grasp, if you will, was how my articulation as a poet came out.”

Morisseau stood out for her performances in numerous musicals in high school, and by the time she arrived for classes at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, she was an accomplished writer and performer, and eager to display her talent in both disciplines. “But I was told I should focus on one or the other,” she says, “not try to be a writer and an actor. And I was frustrated with the lack of roles I was getting as an actor, and then I realized — I’m a writer, why don’t I write myself a role? I was discouraged by some of my professors, but I did it anyway.”

The result was Morisseau’s first play: “The Blackness Blues: Time to Change the Tune, A Sister’s Story,” inspired by “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide,” by the late playwright and poet Notzake Shange.

Initially, Morisseau’s piece was intended for only three characters, but once the word spread around campus, African-American women from all corners — far beyond U-M’s theater department — reached out to Morisseau, anxious to tell their stories onstage.

“That was my entry point into the playwriting of poetry,” Morisseau says. “Notzake gave space and permission for young women, and particularly young Black women like myself, to find our voice through poetry and our declaration of our young Black womanhood through poetry and through theater.”

Morisseau graduated in 2000 from U-M’s School of Music Theater and Dance with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in theater performance. Soon after, she moved to New York City to pursue dancing, while writing performance poetry on the side.

“I was a word artist doing slam poetry, which is competitive poetry,” she explains. “You’re competing in a contest to see who is the best spoken word artist.”

Morisseau won her share of poetry slams, but her winnings were mostly used to pay her rent, and she felt she was losing touch with her loftier goals as an artist and a writer. She joined the Creative Arts Team (CAT) at City University of New York, and the Emerging Writers Group at New York City’s prestigious Public Theater, and her hometown soon became the impetus for her to reconnect with her innate talent as a writer.

“I started to write about Detroit history as a playwright,” she says. “My first body of work that really got me launched in New York productions was the work I was writing about Detroit.”

The body of that work, mostly one-act plays, prompted Morisseau to compose the full-length “Follow Me to Nellie’s,” which focused on a family member from the distant past.

“My great aunt was a madam in Natchez, Miss., during the civil rights movement,” Morisseau says. “I didn’t know what her profession was when I was a kid,
but I’d been to the brothel and knew she was important because a lot of the people in the city respected her. I didn’t know why.”

Eventually Morisseau found out.

“She was known for being a philanthropist as much as she was for being a madam, and for putting her women in the brothel through college with the money she earned. And she assisted the civil rights activists with the brothel money, bailing them out of jail and being an activist for social justice. She had everybody in the city in her pocket, and was a formidable woman.”

The deep dive into Morisseau’s family history was a prelude to a similar extensive exploration of her hometown, inspired by August Wilson’s 10-play cycle, which chronicled the Black experience in America in each of the 10 decades of the 20th century.

Morisseau’s Detroit Project was the result — a story told in three plays, each one set around a pivotal moment that had a significant impact on the city.

“Paradise Blue,” the first of the three plays, is set in the same year as the Housing Act of 1949, which was enacted to help curb the decline of urban housing in the wake of the end of World War II, which triggered urban renewal and the flight to the suburbs.

The focus of “Detroit ’67,” the second play, is on the days leading up to the Detroit riots and the confrontation between the city’s Black working class community and federal troops, the National Guard, and local police. “Detroit Project, Skeleton Crew” is the finale, set in 2008 in a small auto stamping plant. It addresses the consequences of “White flight” to the suburbs, the decline of the auto industry, and the financial collapse of the city.

“Skeleton Crew” was staged on Broadway and was nominated for a Tony Award for best play in 2022.

“Paradise Blue” was performed off Broadway at the Signature Theater in 2018. But it was “Detroit ’67” that established Morisseau as a prominent playwright. The play was performed at the Public Theater, and won the 2014 Edward M. Kennedy Prize for Drama.
“The Detroit cycle became sort of an undeniable force about my voice as a playwright,” Morisseau says. “And the Detroit stories have become a major part of my voice as a writer, and (they’ve) defined me to the entire theater community, even in film and television.

People call me a lot of times, telling stories about Detroit, or wanting to tell Detroit stories, and they seek me out to articulate it for them, or to be a part of their team.”

That explains why Morisseau, who lives in Los Angeles, was an obvious choice to join the production team of “Ain’t Too Proud — The Life and Times of the Temptations.”

“I’m a Detroit girl, and I’m raised in Detroit,” she says, proudly, “so of course I was raised on the Temptations’ music. That’s definitely a no-brainer. And it was also exciting to be able to tell the Temptations’ story through my lens as a Detroiter, so I could put a very strong Detroit touch on the musical, to make sure it was authentic and give Detroit its due in being the glue and foundation for how the Temptations were formed.”

Just last spring, Morisseau received a Doctor of Fine Arts honorary degree from U-M, as she was immersed in developing another project especially close to her heart.

“I’m shooting a film in Detroit based on one of my own stories,” she reveals. “And that’s where I’d next like to move my career and artistic attention — into film, as a director.”
The screen production based on one of her plays will give Morisseau an opportunity to demonstrate her talent as a storyteller in a new and different genre.

“I don’t subscribe to the idea of getting big breaks in life,” she asserts. “I believe life is a series of things you do. But I think there are definitely moments that helped usher me forward with more visibility, and launched me. It was a series of ongoing things, and continues to be a series of ongoing things that allow people to know my work.”

People know her work only because of how well Morisseau knows and values the people who’ve inspired it, since her earliest days.

“Writing has always been my wind, and I just really love the people I write about. I listen to them with my heart, and it guides me in how to tell the stories about them, and it was always affirmed for me by my parents and my family.

“And Detroiters are part of my family, so they’re in my bones and in my practice, and they come to me, speak to me, and I want to tell their stories and honor them. They’re the people who shaped me and showed up for me in this world.”

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