Joyce Casey, long-time Dobama Theatre chief, has a well-earned reputation for gently but bulldoggedly being dedicated to letting little deflect her from carrying out what she conceives of as her administrative mission. Thus, it's hardly surprising - yet certainly remarkable - to discover that, despite having daily struggled for years with the exhausting distractions of trying to find a new permanent home for the area's oldest alternative theater, Casey still has her artistic sights set firmly on the future.

This weekend Dobama opens The Cleveland Plays: Part I: Migration, co-authored by Eric Coble, Nina Domingue and Eric Schmiedl. It's the first of what Casey projects as an annual series that will investigate dramatically, one by one, the many serious problems confronting our city. "The concept occurred to me about a year ago," she says, "at a time when all the news about Cleveland - the schools, economy - was dire. Because I've always considered artists' visions of the world unique - in that they tend to be more intense, innate and encompassing - I thought why not collect some local writers around a table and discuss the possibility of addressing these problems in play form."

"When Joyce got us together last spring," says Coble, "someone suggested that several of us might combine to write on a single issue. Since we were all friends who were willing to risk that friendship, we said yes."

The subject he, Domingue and Schmiedl finally agreed to collaborate on was migration. Asked to define the term, Coble elucidated: "We're a city in serious flux, and a large part of that is about who is choosing to live here or not. In the play, we deal with migration in several ways. There's the physical moving from place to place - not only out of the city, but back into it, and even within it. Yet there's also an inner migration that our characters go on. None of them end up where they started."

To typify these themes, the authors concocted a trio of plot lines that, according to Coble, "add up to a small epic of life in Cleveland in 2008. We follow an empty-nester couple in Aurora and a newly pregnant couple in Slavic Village, each pair trying to decide where, how and if they fit into this city anymore. And wandering through it all is Moses Cleaveland himself, returning to urge everyone into the next great migration - though this time out of the city he birthed 212 years ago."

Expectedly, Migration has seen significant changes since its inception, but less predictably, the creators' friendships remain intact. "As we moved forward with rewrites, we not only shaped one another's scenes, but actually rewrote parts of them," Coble claims. "And what was great was that nobody had their egos attached."

All this selflessness, says the co-conspirator, came in the desire to serve Casey's series concept with a fitting inaugural. "It's a very ambitious proposition, yet practical, since it offers something to the community that isn't offered anywhere else: a commitment to check in each year and see what's on the audiences' and artists' minds about the city we choose to call home."

The Cleveland Plays: Part I: Migration: May 8-June 1, Dobama Theatre, Cleveland Play House, 8500, Euclid Ave., 216.932.3396