Paradise Blue – Elyse Joyner and Logan Pitts, Co-directors; Janie Howland, Scenic Designer; Nia Safarr Banks, Costume Designer; Aubrey Dube, Sound Designer; Toni Sterling, Lighting Designer. Presented by the Gloucester Stage Company, 267 East Main Street, Gloucester through September 18
by Mike Hoban
There’s no shortage of compelling human drama in Paradise Blue, the ambitious 2018 play by Obie Award-winning playwright Dominique Morisseau, now playing at Gloucester Stage. The noir-tinged play explores the lives of the denizens of Paradise Blue, a jazz club nestled in the entertainment district of Paradise Valley in Black Bottom, a predominantly black neighborhood in Detroit in the late 1940’s. But the drama inside the club pales next to the looming threat that lies outside the club’s door – the impending gentrification that will destroy the neighborhood in the years to come under the guise of “urban renewal”.
“See if this plan to clean up the city don’t mean to clean us out,” says one prescient character to his bandmate. “Get rid of all the n***ers. Just like the Mayor say in his campaign – we the blight he talkin’ ‘bout.”
Read more “Gloucester’s ‘Paradise Blue’ Personalizes the Myth of Urban Renewal”
