Penumbra play of Detroit's 1967 riots is painfully familiar

In the tattered basement of an inner-city home, a young black family and their friends talked about love, death, race and their dreams of a modest future together as budding entrepreneurs.

But through the glass block window, the city outside was on fire.

Police in riot gear chased and shot young black men. Crowds of angry neighborhood residents broke windows and set fire to businesses, most of them owned by members of their own community.

The setting was the set of Penumbra Theatre's current play, "Detroit '67," about the civil unrest in that city that ended in 43 deaths, 7,000 arrests and more than 2,000 buildings burned to the ground. The issues and dialogue were so familiar, however, that the scene could have been a CNN segment from the past couple of weeks, or a loop from the coverage of the Ferguson, Mo., conflicts that erupted after two black men died during altercations with police.

The play revolves around a brother and sister shortly after they inherited their family home in Detroit in 1967. To help pay the bills while they debated buying a small neighborhood bar, the siblings hold basement house parties where paying guests dance to the latest Motown music blasted from an 8-track tape player.

It was the same type of after-hours party that Detroit police were raiding all over the city at the time. One of those parties was held to celebrate soldiers returning from Vietnam. The raids angered black residents of the neighborhood, who thought they were being singled out for harassment because of their color, and triggered a pent-up anger over lingering poverty and economic disparity. The Detroit riots were just one of 15 that year that happened across the country, including one in north Minneapolis.

Nearly 50 years later it seems like the only thing that has changed is the music.

H. Adam Harris, Penumbra's teen program coordinator and the facilitator of discussions, said it was important to recognize that "Detroit '67 is a play about people, rather than politics." It shows how a black family tried to make sense of the times and deal with their distrust of police, the violent actions of their neighbors and the gap between the white and black world.

At one point "Sly," a family friend, complained of how constant police harassment made him feel "like I need some sort of pass just to walk the street."

What's uncanny is how similar the Detroit situation seems with several incidents that have happened in the U.S. in the past year. For example, anger grew as various interpretations of events and wild rumors spread throughout the community. One rumor that spread quickly was the myth among the black community that a white man had thrown a black baby off a bridge. The same myth circulated in the white community, only in this version the man was black and the baby was white.

"And this was before Twitter," Harris said.

Actor James T. Alfred, who plays Sly, almost turned down the part.

He eventually decided he wanted the part in the riveting and timely plot by Dominique Morisseau. "Her work hurts, and it should hurt," Alfred said.

So now he performs at Penumbra only to go home and see a strange replay of the script on the television.

"I look on the news and see the same images in Baltimore that you saw in 1967," Alfred said. "For me, it's not depressing. For me it's about fighting cynicism. When I go home and see these same images, I see that we have a lot of work to do."

Audience member Robin Magee grew up in Detroit, so the play brought back memories, right down to the furniture and art work on the set. She remembers the fear, but events empowered people in the black community, so "some good came of it," she said.

The family dynamics in "Detroit '67" also mirror current themes. Even while they criticize police abuse, characters struggle to comprehend why some of their neighbors set fire to local businesses, only making life in the community more difficult.

"He comes home with these stories about how police are treated," said Van. "They are afraid for their lives too. I didn't know much about police work until [we married], but it has given me a really different perspective."

For Van, recent incidents between blacks and police "just makes the play more real. I don't know the situation has ever gone away, we've had problems with relationships between police and the community for a long time. People are more aware of it now because of the media."

Van said she feels a responsibility to bring the perspective of a normal black family during such a crisis.

"When you have no money and no property and feel like you have nothing to lose, it's a very dangerous place to be," said Van, who hopes the play's ending resonates with the audience.

She sees her character as "going for hope anyway, despite what's going on," Van said. "All we can do is keep loving."

jtevlin@startribune.com • 612-673-1702