DOG TEETH

HOWLER opened on the rainy night of October 4th, 2022, in a converted machine shop on McNichols Road, with thirty-two paying audience members and one wholly unauthorised dog who had wandered in from the alley. The opening production was Coyote, Coyote, a world premiere by the Detroit poet and first-time playwright Mireya Diallo-Adekunle, directed by our founder Jaylen Brooks-Akufo over fourteen weeks of rehearsal across three borrowed storefronts.

Three seasons later, we are nine productions in, all of them world premieres, all of them paid above-scale, all of them sold on a pay-what-you-can basis. We have never staged a revival, a Shakespeare, a Christmas show, an adaptation, or a transfer. We have nothing against any of those things — we simply don't do them, and we don't think we ever will. Detroit is a city full of writers nobody is producing, and we built the company to produce them.

Of the nine plays we have produced, three have transferred to other companies, two have been published as books, and one — Loud House, by our Season II writer Aurelia Reyes-Choi — is now in pre-production at a regional theater in Minneapolis with a budget thirty times the one we made it on. We mention these not to claim them as victories, but to point at the part of the work that has nothing to do with us.

What is ours, and what we keep doing, is this: three new plays a year, paid fairly, performed for whoever shows up. We are a 501(c)(3), an Equity URTA company, and the smallest professional theater in Detroit. We do not aspire to be a larger one.