Chelsea’s Purple Rose Theatre Company, founded by the town’s resident movie/TV/Broadway star Jeff Daniels, opened in 1991 with the aim of “growing” and producing new plays alongside American classics.

Giving voice to the experience of living in the Midwest is certainly part of that picture – “When I started out in theater in the 1970s, I thought all plays were about neurotic people living in New York,” said longtime Rose artistic director Guy Sanville – but sometimes the Rose’s roster of plays gets even more specific, focusing on Michigan’s history and challenges.

The Rose’s current professional season, for example, features new work from three Michigan playwrights (Daniels is one, along with David MacGregor and Jeff Duncan), and two of those three are telling Michigan stories: “Flint,” the Rose’s current production, which is set in the time just before the town made national headlines in 2016 because of its water crisis; and “Willow Run,” which tells a tale of a handful of women who went to work at Ypsilanti’s bomber plant during World War II. READ THE REST HERE