Michelle Tyrene Johnson

Lorraine is a single black woman who lives unhappily in Dallas where she has worked for a marketing firm since graduating from college. Big decisions weigh her down and in a meta-weird way she works this all out in her therapist’s office. Kelly, her therapist, wants Lorraine to picture herself in her safe space when she’s in a therapy session. But for Lorraine, safe space is more of a happy place. And her happy place is an airport waiting area at Dallas Love Field. Her marketing company is about to lay off several employees but offers her a freelance contract to stay. Is the anonymous comfort of her favorite sports bar enough to keep her tethered to Texas? Her love interest, Moussa, wants to take the relationship further, but he lives in Dakar, Senegal where he helps run the family hotel chain. Is moving to West Africa in her future? In Lorraine’s spare time, she has recreated her grandma’s concoction for hair repair, and an International cosmetics conglomerate in Amsterdam, Netherlands wants to make her the modern-day C. J. Walker. Should Lorraine start all over again in a first-class European city? And then there’s her father back in her hometown of Memphis who Lorraine has been estranged from but who now has prostate cancer? Should she move back to Tennessee to mend her relationship with her only living parent? With simple props and use of the stage, Lorraine moves in and out of place and space on three continents as she decides whether the next adventure of her life centers on love, money, family, or the ease of status quo. Thematically, this is a play about a woman who is at a crossroads in trying to figure out what she wants, what she has grown into, and how to step into power, happiness, forgiveness, and love.

Five contemporary black women friends from Kansas City, Missouri take a weekend train trip as part of their book/wine club. Marie, a librarian, in addition to arranging the trip, is also doing research for her grandmother’s 80th birthday which involves looking through “The Negro Motorist Green Book,” the guidebook used by African-Americans in pre-integration America to know the safe places to stay and patronize while traveling. Marie accidentally time travels to the 1940s, where she stays in a boarding house mentioned in the Green Book. But not only has she traveled to Jim Crow Missouri, she finds herself staying in a boarding house that is actually a bordello, and where one of the “working girls” may be her great-grandmother. (The four women in the past that Marie meets are double cast with her friends on the train trip.)

Jaime McBride, an African-American woman college professor, studies and teaches genealogy. She has improperly used her resources to find out about her biological family. And without knowing that a blood tie exists, someone walks into Jaime's life, which causes Jaime to question her life choices, her concept of family, and to figure out if it's possible to re-plant an old family tree.

Zora Anderson, a young African-American woman, co-owns Octavia's Diner with her father. The popular diner is named after Zora's deceased mother. Zora is torn between duty to her family by staying to expand the diner in a lucrative deal offered by the city's entertainment district, and the opportunity to move halfway across the country, as part of a prestigious graduate school fellowship, to write a book about her idol, Science Fiction writer Octavia Butler.

*** Held under option by Rhymes Over Beats (NYC) from 2015-2018

A white police officer seeks legal consultation after the shooting death of an unarmed black teenager. Both members of the law firm and the police officer find out unexpected facts from the other.

Comic drama (or dramatic comedy) about two very different black women who bump into each other at a funeral parlor as they are making final arrangements to bury their husbands. The strangers discover that it's not husbands plural - it's one dead man who lived a double life.

This is a magical realism in a one-person show. The Negro Whisperer is a figure that travels through space and time giving advice, guidance and support to blacks in American.

The circumstances she (or he) would advise on range from everything to a young black college student being harassed by classmates who consider her name “ghetto” to failure to get Trayvon Martin to stop walking alone in a strange, white neighborhood.

The Washingtons, an African-American family, has lived next door to the Levy family in a Philadelphia neighborhood for a few generations and in the wake of the death of the Washington family matriarch, secrets, discoveries and conflicts collide. The Washingtons finding old stock in the Levy family business creates family, cultural and personal tension.

What if blacks were reduced to one person and whites reduced to one person and they had to verbally slug out how both races would continue to co-exist in America? "Trading Races: From Rodney King to Paula Deen" explores with humor and uncomfortable jabs how racial tension has led to where this country is and what uncomfortable truths have to unfold for it to continue. Will Billy and Eve fight it out and save this country's future? Or will Weeping Hawk make America have the ultimate do-over?

Wiccans in the Hood” is an one-act play that takes place in a cemetery located in an urban, predominantly black neighborhood. Three white people and a Black (or Latino) friend decide to perform a centuries-old ritual of offerings to an African spirit when they are encountered by a black woman who lives in the neighborhood who originally mistakes them for Wiccans. The offerings include eggplants, lit candles, flowers and even a teddy bear at some point. With comedy and emotional confrontation, all five characters delve in to the testy areas of religion, race and convention and become transformed by the experience.