The riches of Portland theater in these times — and specifically theater featuring the work of Black artists — continues to amaze and inspire. And Portland Playhouse is an especially notable bearer of that light.

I am not prepared to say that all the Black artists in Portland have opportunities to offer all they have to give. But in this predominantly white city whose Black community has faced so many challenges of displacement and harm, Black artists — both local and folks with whom our local artists have built relationships — demonstrate the resourcefulness and tenacity and brilliance required to continue to offer this community great theatrical work illuminating the experience of the Black diaspora.

The latest example of this at Portland Playhouse — coming off its remarkable production of August Wilson’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone this past spring — is a new production of Dominique Morisseau’s play Paradise Blue. Part of a cycle of three plays set in her native Detroit, this one is set in 1949 in the neighborhood of Black Bottom, once a predominantly Black neighborhood that was demolished for redevelopment in the late 1950s and early 1960s.  

At the time of the play, Black Bottom is still a thriving Black community, though thriving in the way so many later-displaced Black communities in the U.S. have thrived. It had a vibrant, nationally famous music scene, and also plenty of restaurants, grocers, physicians, and drugstores serving its community of Black people.  

But it was crowded with people, many of whom had fled poverty and racial terror during the Great Migration, and who had limited opportunities and limited places to live given practices of racial discrimination facilitated by federal and state law. As was the pattern, Black Bottom became a target of so-called urban renewal, bolstered by what would now be more readily spotted as racist justifications (not that such practices have ended), and was replaced by the Chrysler Freeway and a mixed-income development now known as Lafayette Park.

This context hovers over the play’s action, but I can’t say I already knew this history, though I lived near and worked in Detroit for many years and return to the city often. It’s the sort of history that hides in plain sight (in Portland as well as Detroit and many other American cities), driving and sometimes poisoning the energy of what happens in the wake of our collective failure to reckon with the destruction. Morisseau offers us a window into this lost community, and spurred me (as it may spur you) to investigate some of what hides in a city I know well but not well enough.

Morisseau couldn’t wish for a better director than Lou Bellamy, the cofounder and artistic director of Penumbra Theater in St. Paul, Minnesota.  Bellamy has directed at Portland Playhouse many times, including that excellent spring production of Joe Turner, and this show is produced in cooperation with Penumbra, which has a longstanding relationship with Portland Playhouse. Working with a powerful cast and design team in the intimate quarters of the Playhouse space, Bellamy knows how to transport us into spaces many of us would not otherwise enter.

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The action takes place in a club and boarding house owned by the troubled trumpet player and band leader Blue (Mikell Sapp). His band includes a young percussionist, P-Sam (La’Tevin Alexander, a favorite of Portland audiences and last seen in Joe Turner), and Corn (the great Lester Purry, also last seen here in Joe Turner). P-Sam and Corn are accustomed to navigating Blue’s moods and his insistence on dominance; he has just fired the band’s bass player for asking questions that Blue views as unreasonable only because he insists on total control. 

As the play’s action unfolds, it becomes clear that further tensions roil beneath the surface: As the Detroit mayor is making noise about clearing out what he terms the “slums,” P-Sam is fighting to hold on to what can be achieved in a community controlled by Black artists. 

As P-Sam puts it, “Ain’t no place for a colored man outside Black Bottom. … I been on that stint, playin’ the white man’s club in Detroit … entering through the back door … standin’ on them stages and smilin’ like I’m happy to be entertainin’ these no-count crackers that think of me as less than the spilled whiskey on they shoe.” 

Corn, older and longer-accustomed to working with Blue, is more inclined toward accommodation — but it becomes harder and harder to ignore what P-Sam fears: that Blue intends to sell the club to the city.

Even more accommodating than Corn is Blue’s romantic partner, Pumpkin (Netty McKenzie). She cooks and cleans the boarding house and devotes herself to what she sees as her special skill of making Blue feel safe; she is a self-described “go-along gal.” 

As the play unfolds it becomes apparent that caring for Blue also means withstanding abuse from him, a still-common problem that arguably was even more accepted at the time. But there are signs that there is more to Pumpkin. She doesn’t hide her love for words and poetry, regularly treating band members to recitations from her favorite poet, Georgia Douglas Johnson, a central figure of the Harlem Renaissance.  Her recitations are full of feeling; the small space Pumpkin has carved out for her own poetic soul.

Into this tight-knit world of managed tensions strides Silver (Cycerli Ash, also featured in Joe Turner), a woman who does not resist the description applied to her by others as a “Black widow spider.” Silver is as different from Pumpkin as one could be: She arrives without a man and asserts her power. (“My ol’ man dead,” she declares, clarifying that a one-person room in the boarding house will suit her fine.)  Every entrance and exit draws all eyes to her — that walk!  She is not afraid to employ her sexuality in service of her own goals. Among them is to buy Blue’s club.

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It becomes apparent that while others, like P-Sam and Pumpkin, value the community of Black Bottom, Blue doesn’t share their feelings. He is tormented by family trauma and racism and apparent mental illness, and the club, which bears the name Paradise, is no paradise to him. Blue is chasing a pathway out, which he believes will involve finding that perfect tone — a “love supreme” — on his trumpet and moving to Chicago. 

The play surfaces conflicts between those who want to preserve and cultivate the community and those who are driven to pursue what they can gain from what exploitation offers. As depicted here, racism and its reverberating trauma influence how people sort through those stakes.

I can’t say that I find the play’s resolution of those conflicts strikes that perfect note of “love supreme” that Blue is searching for. What it does best, though — especially in this well-directed offering of fine performances — is to open a compassionate window into the variety of experiences that have been lost in our haste to destroy what we term the “slums.” 

Alexander embodies the bright and frustrated energy of P-Sam. Purry gives us a gentle, worldly-wise, still-hungry Corn, careful always to not ask for more than he is likely to get. Ash’s Silver captivates with the ways she employs her power to demonstrate that she, a person who has been messed with, is now not a person to be messed with. She can “leave [a man] behind” but “take [his music] forever.”  Her scenes with Pumpkin are especially interesting, as the two women struggle with the dangers and limits of what a woman can claim. And McKenzie is a luminous Pumpkin, helping you feel the ache of lost and sacrificed dreams and potential.

Although the play takes Pumpkin’s education from Silver in a direction that left me dissatisfied, I acknowledge that I don’t have a satisfying resolution to offer for conflicts like these, which continue to trouble us. Sapp captures a sense of the torment that doesn’t excuse Blue’s behavior but places it in the context of a collective struggle. 

Blue’s torment and the harm radiating out from it reflect back conflicts that are bigger than one man’s family or experience, inside a larger community (extending far beyond Black Bottom) that has no intention of shouldering its share. The options for his more immediate community are neither obvious nor satisfying.

As we can count on from this theater, the production holds all of this supremely well. Maruti Evan’s inventive scenic design places us in the bar, and then opens up to offer a window into Silver’s tiny room above. The set employs images of the larger community to put this small place in the context that figures so importantly in the story. We even see ourselves in the wall behind the bar, connecting us to that destroyed community. 

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And as always, Wanda Walden’s imaginative costume design captures the color and creativity so common in communities like this one. 

This is theater to be grateful for, and certainly not to be missed.

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Paradise Blue continues through Nov. 2 at Portland Playhouse, 602 N.E. Prescott St., Portland. Ticket and schedule information here.