Paradise Blue is one of a trilogy of plays that make up Dominique Morisseau’s Detroit Project. Morisseau drew from the stories of Detroit elders to evoke the sounds and struggle of Black Bottom, a vibrant if overcrowded Black neighborhood in the 1940s, and its neighboring entertainment district, Paradise Valley. Segregation confined the waves of Black migrants—drawn during the Great Migration to Detroit for its industrial jobs and the city’s rich cultural life that the Black community created from the many tributaries of their home places—to a relatively small area next to downtown. By 1949, when Paradise Blue is set, the area had nearly 400 Black-owned businesses and a thriving middle class of Black lawyers, dressmakers, dentists, and doctors, as well as a jazz and bop scene that regularly hosted musicians form Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington to Billie Holiday and Charles Mingus. (Many of the same musicians toured to DC’s U Street, Harlem, and Paradise Valley.)
Morisseau found critical inspiration for Paradise Blue from playwright Pearl Cleage’s 1990 essay, “Mad at Miles,” in which Cleage wrestles with her deep appreciation for the genius of Miles Davis while also refusing to look away from his self-admitted pattern of violence towards the women in his life. Cleage struggles to understand how to relate to the art she loves and what she owes to an artist who never expressed regret for the harm he caused to people in his life. “Can we continue to celebrate the genius in the face of the monster?,” she asks.
Morisseau’s answer to this question is likewise complex. Paradise Blue revolves in part around the tormented trumpeter Blue, a man who’s inherited his father’s talent, nightclub, and demons. Morisseau has said, “it’s important to me that there’s an understanding of the heart and soul and frustration that goes into Black musicians who are trying to exist in a racist time—in an overtly racist time—and how that can sometimes eat those musicians and those artists alive.” If music is eating him alive, Blue is also standing at a crossroads of cultural change—in 1949, the newly elected mayor Albert Cobo had won on the promise of removing “urban blight” (like the rundown buildings of Black Bottom) alongside the explicit promise that Black residents would never be able to move into Detroit’s white suburbs. At the top of the play, Blue has been contacted by city officials interested in purchasing his jazz spot, The Paradise Club.
Morisseau builds the rest of her story like a jazz quintet, using Blue’s trumpet, the voices of Blue’s literal bandmates, percussionist Sam and piano man Corn, alongside the lyricism of Pumpkin, Blue’s girlfriend who loves poetry as much as she loves the community of Black Bottom and the staccato of Silver, a “spider woman” in the film noir mold, who lays her own syncopation over the club’s dynamic. As Paradise’s legacy of violence gathers shape and the forces of gentrification swirl around the club, Morisseau’s focus shifts to Pumpkin, who finds herself questioning what she’s willing to sacrifice for the things she loves: Blue’s gift, the imperfect and striving Blue himself, a community that offers the gift of being known, and her own artistic inklings. Will she trade some part of her dreams for Blue’s peace? Will she have to?
With echoes of DC’s Black Broadway, and its “Chocolate City” era of Black leadership and cultural institutions now lost to development and a rising cost of living, Paradise Blue weaves a story of community and accountability, of carving out cultural autonomy in the face of a city government with a plan to erase you, of claiming genius in a world that barely considers you fully human—and of the cost of trying to create a community where all of its members thrive.
—Adrien-Alice Hansel