José Casas (Playwright) is a playwright, director, and actor. He is an associate professor and leads the playwriting minor in the Department of Theatre & Drama. Casas’s plays have been produced across the country and include la rosa grows beyond the wall, all brown all chingon, aDoBe, a million whispers all at once, and the vine. His plays la ofrenda, somebody’s children, Desvelado, and Mariposa/Butterfly have received the AATE Distinguished Play Award (2007, 2010, 2022, 2023). He has had multiple plays win the Bonderman National Playwriting for Youth Award. He was also awarded the inaugural Dominic Orlando Playwriting Award. His work has been included in a number of anthologies such as The Bully Plays, Ethnodrama: An Anthology of Reality Theatre, and Theatre for Youth II: More Plays With Mature Themes. His published work includes la ofrenda, 14, somebody’s children, and Palabras del Cielo: An Exploration of Latina/o Theatre for Young Audiences, which was awarded the AATE Distinguished Book Award (2019).

Why does The Wizard of Oz endure? Why, more than a century after L. Frank Baum first imagined this distinctly American fairy tale, does it still hold such power? Why do we, time and again, return to Oz—reinventing it, reinterpreting it, and rediscovering its meaning in the context of our own moment?

These questions have guided our journey in adapting The Wizard of Oz in collaboration with the extraordinary students at the University of Michigan. Our process has been deeply interdisciplinary, weaving together theatre, dance, original music, and a hopefully unexpected visual design to reimagine Oz for a world fractured by inequality, fear, and the relentless, necessary search for belonging.

At its core, Oz has always been about home (an idea much more fraught than we usually allow for). Dorothy’s journey to and from the Emerald City is one of self-discovery, shaped by the companions they meet along the way—figures who, like them, are searching for something essential. Our Dorothy is a queer Latinx woman from a small industrial Midwest city, angry at a society that devalues them and those like them. That anger propels them into Oz, a world that eerily mirrors their own—a place where power is built on spectacle and the illusion of control.

To frame this story, we looked to another great work of American letters: Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. Written just a few decades after Baum’s Oz, Wilder’s play strips away theatrical illusion to reveal the act of storytelling itself as the essential magic of the stage. In our production, we embrace this non-illusionistic approach, positioning Toto as a theatrical interlocutor in the vein of Wilder’s Stage Manager—guiding us through Oz not as a land of seamless fantasy, but as a constructed space, a reflection of both our dreams and our disillusionments. This allows us to hold up a mirror to our own world, reminding us that all theatre is an act of collective imagination, one that depends on the audience’s belief in what might be possible.

Within this framework, Oz becomes not just a whimsical escape, but a meditation on power and belonging. The Wizard, a charismatic and fun-loving leader, holds sway through performance, spectacle, and the force of personality—an archetype deeply embedded in American culture. Dorothy’s companions, too, carry the weight of this world’s systems: El Scarecrow, a Chicano man, has been brutalized by structures that refuse to see his intelligence; the Lion, nonbinary and queer, has been taught to fear everything, including themselves; and Tin Woman, a kind of cyborg, lost her heart while laboring within Oz’s machinery, retreating from society after it took too much from her.

Baum envisioned Oz as a fairy tale for America, a story both of adventure and self-actualization. Over time, the narrative has been reclaimed and reshaped—from The Wiz to Wicked to this very Our Oz —each iteration interrogating who gets to belong and who is left behind. By bringing Our Town into dialogue with Oz, we underscore the act of storytelling itself as an urgent, communal gesture: an invitation to see our world differently and imagine a future where we all find our way home—however we choose to define it.

Enjoy the journey, but be mindful: we don’t know what the destination will ask of us.

—Jake Hooker

Our Oz is a product of multiplicity. During the process of developing this piece, the team considered a variety of cultural and historical influences, not easily contained by singularity, to construct our version of a land that continues to be a major fixation of the American imagination. We wonder, as dramaturgs, what the multi-dimensionality of this land may be like, and how it could coexist, especially given its iconic yet liminal place in previous incarnations of the story. We invite you to immerse yourself in OUR Oz by exploring digital resources (see below) that further illuminate some of the cultural and historical pathways used to develop the piece.

These different dimensions of Oz may resonate distinctly with individual audience members, and we challenge you to explore what it feels like in the more unfamiliar corners of this world. Just some of the influences that you may pick up on are the sights and sounds of Ballroom, a movement that has served as a subcultural space for Black and Latiné queer and trans people to find a sense of home for decades. Also circling Oz is the tremendous impact of the Chicano activist movement’s major players, such as Dolores Huerta, Cesar Chavez, and Luis Valdez’s El Teatro Campesino, all known for “demonstrating the politics of survival” in different, sometimes distinct ways. There are hints of the tension here between a recuperation of manhood championed by Chavez and exclusionary narratives sometimes at the expense of others within and outside of the movement. El Scarecrow’s friendship with Dorothy, perhaps spotlighting a masculinity forced on him through time in the prison-industrial complex, challenges his mask born of necessity. Tin Woman too, struggling with aging and her binary system of ones and zeros becoming “outdated,” and the Lion, not able to fulfill an antiquated two-sided notion of gender for the legacy of family, favor masking for survival in this world through which they have lost, or have never gained, something fundamental for their humanity.

As you experience the many places in which OUR Ozians sit and strive to be out from under the seductive yet hollow sentiments of its foreign, charismatic leader, consider the impact of larger social movements, their leans toward complexity, and sometimes their descents into chaos. Through this prism, we can perhaps see the alliance of the four friends—Dorothy, El Scarecrow, the Tin Woman, and the Lion—as a vibrant mini-movement of the now, searching to be recognized by those in power as deserving of what they supposedly lack and of their right to exist in the face of oppression on their own terms, especially when what it means and how it looks to possess a fundamental of being has many, many possibilities.

To peer deeper into the multiple, fantastical,
historical world of OUR Oz, scan here:

Anishinaabeg gaa bi dinokiiwaad temigad manda Michigan Kichi Kinoomaagegamig. Mdaaswi nshwaaswaak shi mdaaswi shi niizhawaaswi gii-sababoonagak, Ojibweg, Odawaag, minwaa Bodwe’aadamiig wiiba gii-miigwenaa’aa maamoonjiniibina Kichi Kinoomaagegamigoong wi pii-gaa aanjibiigaadeg Kichi-Naakonigewinning, debendang manda aki, mampii Niisaajiwan, gewiinwaa niijaansiwaan ji kinoomaagaazinid. Daapanaming ninda kidwinan, megwaa minwaa gaa bi aankoosejig zhinda akiing minwaa gii-miigwewaad Kichi-Kinoomaagegamigoong aanji-daapinanigaade minwaa mshkowenjigaade.

The University of Michigan is located on the traditional territory of the Anishinaabe people. In 1817, the Ojibwe, Odawa, and Bodewadami Nations made the largest single land transfer to the University of Michigan. This was offered ceremonially as a gift through the Treaty at the Foot of the Rapids so that their children could be educated. Through these words of acknowledgment, their contemporary and ancestral ties to the land and their contributions to the University are renewed and reaffirmed.

07 – Turn of the Screw