It started with a police raid on an unlicensed bar in Detroit. It ended with 43 dead, 1,189 injured and more than 400 buildings destroyed. Alternately called the 1967 Detroit Riot, the Detroit Uprising, the Detroit Rebellion and the 12th Street Riot, this five-day conflict primarily pitted African American residents against the Detroit Police Department. Many longstanding factors, including police brutality, housing segregation and unemployment, contributed to the riot.

Tawnya Pettiford-Wates was visiting family in Detroit when the rioting began. 

“It was pretty intense,” recalls the Virginia Commonwealth University professor of graduate acting and directing, better known as Dr. T. “We were supposed to spend weeks up there with my aunt and my cousins, but when everything broke out, we hightailed it back to Pennsylvania.”

It’s a unique understanding of place and history that Pettiford-Wates brings to directing Dominque Morisseau’s play “Detroit ’67,” opening this Friday at the Firehouse Theatre.

The initial conflict of this drama involves two siblings at odds with what to do with their family inheritance. Chelle and Lank have converted the basement of their childhood home into an after-hours club to bring in some extra money.

Lank dreams of purchasing a bar with their inheritance; Chelle, who has a son attending Tuskegee Institute, would rather play it safe.

These tensions rise after Lank and his friend Sly find a battered white woman on the street and bring her into the house to recuperate. Katrinah Carol Lewis, who plays Chelle in the Firehouse production, says audiences will endear themselves to Morisseau’s characters.

“They’re so lovable, you fall for them immediately and root for them immediately,” says Lewis, who is also Firehouse’s associate artistic director. “The story is such a journey. At times you think you know the direction that it’s going and then you don’t. It keeps you on the edge of your seat.”

Lewis has had a long-standing connection with Morisseau’s work, including directing “Pipeline” at Virginia Rep, “Blood at the Root” at the University of Richmond and a staged reading of “Detroit ’67” with the New Theatre before it merged with the Firehouse.

She says Chelle, her character in this show, is multifaceted.

“She’s loving, she’s fierce, she doesn’t take no mess from nobody,” Lewis says. “Her life is centered around her family and keeping the house together, the family together, and being smart about this inheritance that she’s received.”

Jeremy Morris, who plays Sly in the show, says part of Morisseau’s skill is creating a show about realistic characters during significant moments in history (“Detroit ’67” is the first of Morisseau’s three-play cycle “The Detroit Project”). Morris says the themes of “Detroit ’67” are vitally relevant to our current political moment.

“Looking at what’s going on now, I think people will find so much connection,” Morris says. “Anyone who has been paying attention knows we have been here before.”

In the script, Sly is described as “slick,” “sweet-talking” and “an honest hustler and numbers man.” Given his character’s entrepreneurial inclinations, Morris says Sly would have made the Forbes list if he’d lived in a time that allowed Black men more opportunities to prosper financially.

“He would have owned successful businesses. He would have been a banker. He could have been the town mayor at some point,” Morris says.

“This man prides himself on being the honest numbers man and giving people an opportunity to have their dreams fulfilled a little bit.”

Beyond the conflict, Pettiford-Wates notes Detroit was one of the major American cities that birthed the Black middle class during the Great Migration, a movement that saw 6 million African Americans leave the rural South to pursue better social and economic conditions.

“Next to Chicago, it was like a Mecca,” Pettiford-Wates says. “It had all of the ingredients of success for Black people.”

And as catchy as Motown music may be— Motown being a portmanteau of “motor” and “town” in reference to Detroit’s auto industry—its establishment and success was also a political act.

“The music was a form of resistance in that time,” Pettiford-Wates says. “Playing the music, having the community gatherings in these house parties was a way of resistance and a weapon against spiraling into the depression of your circumstances.”

While acting in the Broadway tour of “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf” in the late ’70s, Pettiford-Wates had the opportunity to revisit some of her old Detroit stomping grounds.

“Detroit hadn’t recovered from what had happened in ’67,” she says. “Detroit is still recovering from what happened in ’67. A lot of people left and never came back.”

Overall, Pettiford-Wates lauds the playwright for crafting a work that tells a realistic story to explore larger societal truths.

“Dominique Morisseau is an incredible writer, and the storytelling is beautiful,” she says. “Even though the story has a lot of pain in it, there’s also the resiliency and the power of legacy and family and love and hope.”

“Detroit ’67” continues through March 30 at the Firehouse Theatre, For more information, visit firehousetheatre.org.

This story originally appeared on styleweekly.com.