Downtown Renewal Means Trouble in ‘Paradise Blue’

NEW YORK — In a Detroit neighborhood called Black Bottom, at the heart of a club district called Paradise Valley, a trumpeter called Blue runs a joint called Paradise, where he fronts a quartet whose sidemen include a drummer called P-Sam and a pianist called Corn.

The bassist has quit, perhaps because his name was just Joe.

Everything is overripe like that in “Paradise Blue,” the jazz noir play by Dominique Morisseau that opened Sunday at the Signature Theater in Manhattan. The names are the least of it — though the two women involved in the men’s lives go by Pumpkin and Silver, as if they were paint chips.

Pumpkin (Kristolyn Lloyd, late of “Dear Evan Hansen”) is Blue’s girlfriend and the club’s chatelaine: cleaning, cooking and starching the sheets for the musicians and boarders living upstairs. She’s a “go-along gal,” happy to serve her troubled man and his difficult art while repressing her own ambitions and talents.

But Silver (Simone Missick) represses nothing; she is a black widow (in both senses of the phrase) who shows up at the club one day in 1949 oozing erotic charisma like Kathleen Turner in “Body Heat.” Born in Louisiana, Silver arrives with every noir mystery woman’s attendant clichés: a lubricious walk, a wad of cash in the bosom of her complicated lingerie, a languorous way of lighting cigarettes — and a gun.

The gun is the first thing that goes off in “Paradise Blue,” but it’s something of a red herring; although the play is structured as a flashback whodunit, no one has much of a motive to kill. True, Blue (J. Alphonse Nicholson) is angry and ornery, making the more likably hotheaded P-Sam (Francois Battiste) steam. Corn (Keith Randolph Smith) is the conciliator, excusing Blue’s difficult personality as the price a black artist pays in a racist society.

“Brilliant and second class,” he says. “Make you insane."

But that explanation, however true, isn’t effectively dramatized, as the play takes place entirely among the five black characters. (On Neil Patel’s awkward set, the action never leaves the confines of the club.) What the production, directed by Ruben Santiago-Hudson, emphasizes is a private illness: Blue is being driven mad by memories of his tragic mother and psychotic father, also a jazzman. As their ghosts crowd in, he starts to lose faith in himself and his music.

Morisseau parallels his spiritual decay with that of the city. She sets the play just as incoming Detroit Mayor Albert Cobo, having run on a platform of reversing urban blight, starts making offers to buy black-owned property downtown. (“We the blight he talkin’ about,” P-Sam says.) In the city’s pre-emptive offer for his prime location, Blue sees a way out, even if it leaves the others in limbo.

Pumpkin asks in purple horror, “You gonna sell Paradise?"

For Pumpkin, the club, like Black Bottom generally, is a hard-earned home. For Silver, it is something even more: a community in which black people run their own businesses rather than (in Morisseau’s typically pungent phrase) “sharecroppin’ and reapin’ white folks’ harvest.” And for P-Sam, it is the one place where black musicians are not subjected to the indignities of white clubs, allowing them to be the “kings” they are meant to be.

With these visions at stake, Blue’s willingness to consider the city’s offer is seen as a race betrayal, or at least as his sacrificing community on the altar of private art. To counteract that, the others make offers of their own.

Oddly in a play that features so much talk of jazz and poetry, the real estate story is the most compelling aspect of “Paradise Blue.” Detroit under the real Mayor Cobo, who promised to stem what he called the “Negro invasion” of its white neighborhoods, was not the only city to use slum clearing as an excuse to undermine its black population. August Wilson’s Pittsburgh comes immediately to mind, and not just because his play “Jitney,” though set in 1977, turns on a similar plot point.

Also like “Jitney,” “Paradise Blue” is part of a series set in one city across different decades — in this case a trilogy that includes Morisseau’s “Skeleton Crew” (presented by the Atlantic Theater Company in 2016) and “Detroit ‘67” (seen at the Public Theater in 2013). I liked both of those better than I do “Paradise Blue,” which so overplays its genre tropes that the characters feel like incoherent afterthoughts. Especially in the second act, as the plot tries to wind itself into a climax, they stop making sense.

Instead of resisting that problem, Santiago-Hudson, who directed the belated Broadway premiere of “Jitney” last year, doubles down on it. Every choice seems as extreme as possible, from the cut of the costumes (by Clint Ramos) to the chiaroscuro lighting (by Rui Rita). The performances, too, are hot and compelling in the way a five-alarm fire is, making you want to keep watching but also keep your distance. Nicholson’s intensity is especially alarming and Missick makes a stunning New York theater debut just walking across the stage.

But everyone in the cast has lovely moments. Lloyd’s come mostly at the beginning, before her character undergoes inexplicable changes. Battiste and Smith — who was terrific in “Jitney” as well — are solid throughout.

“Jitney” may serve as a useful template here. Though Wilson wrote it first among his 10 Pittsburgh Cycle plays, he withdrew it for 14 years while he turned out such masterworks as “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” “Fences,” “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone” and “The Piano Lesson.” The revised version of “Jitney” that was finally produced was a much better play than the one he had put in a drawer.

Likewise, “Paradise Blue,” despite several years of development — its world premiere was at the Williamstown Theater Festival in 2015 — feels like a work that merits deeper and longer reconsideration. Though it engages powerful ideas in a format too weak to handle them, that’s a much more promising problem than the other way around.

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“Paradise Blue”

Through June 10 at the Pershing Square Signature Center, Manhattan; 212-244-7529, signaturetheatre.org. Running time: 2 hours, 20 minutes.

By Dominique Morisseau; directed by Ruben Santiago-Hudson; sets by Neil Patel; costumes by Clint Ramos; lighting by Rui Rita; sound by Darron L. West; original music by Kenny Rampton; hair and wigs by Charles G. LaPointe; fight direction by Thomas Schall; music director, Bill Sims Jr.; production stage manager, Laura Wilson; associate artistic director, Beth Whitaker; general manger, Gilbert Medina. Presented by Signature Theater, Paige Evans, artistic director, Harold Wolpert, executive director, James Houghton, founder.

Cast: J. Alphonse Nicholson (Blue), Kristolyn Lloyd (Pumpkin), Keith Randolph Smith (Corn), Francois Battiste (P-Sam) and Simone Missick (Silver).