“Paradise Blue” Burns Red Hot

A man in a blue suit stands alone on a stage in a small club and begins to play the trumpet. His talent isn’t in question. He has a gift for the instrument. But the sound he makes speaks of frustration too, of running up against limitations, about wrestling with inner turmoil. There is a sense of the player reaching for something and not getting there, and knowing he’s not getting there. What is he going to do about it?

That little solo at the beginning of Dominique Morisseau’s Paradise Blue — running at Long Wharf Theatre through Dec. 16 — is an overture to the rest of the drama, a stating of its central theme. It’s 1949, and the trumpet player on the stage is Blue (Stephen Tyrone Williams) who owns a club called Paradise in the Black Bottom neighborhood of Detroit, a place where the businesses and much of the property is — or was, emphasis on the past tense — African-American owned. It’s not a spoiler to reveal that Black Bottom doesn’t exist anymore; it was razed in the 1950s in a fit of urban renewal to make way for a highway and new housing, its residents displaced. The play happens at the very beginning of that effort. The city is going around hoping to buy up properties. Some people want to cash in. Others see what the city is doing and would rather resist. But the outcome feels inevitable even in the context of the play, and lends weight to the play’s more personal themes.

Both as a musician and a business owner, Blue is tormented. A man with a dark past, he now seeks control — maybe domination — over his music, his club, and his future, even as he senses that in some ways it is all slipping from his grasp. His anger is a storm that those around him weather with only moderate degrees of success. His longtime piano player, Corn (Leon Addison Brown) feels he understands Blue and is most loyal to him, though he’s not blind to Blue’s rage or its effects. Younger drummer P‑Sam (Freddie Fulton), on the other hand, has had just about all he can take of Blue’s domineering ways. Caught somewhere in the middle, still sorting it out for herself, is Blue’s significant other Pumpkin (Margaret Odette), who helps Blue run the club and keep up the rooms he rents above it. She has a gift of her own, for poetry, for songwriting even, that she doesn’t let herself develop. She feels that Blue is protecting her from an even more unstable life that she might have without him. But what is protecting her from Blue?

Things get more complicated when into this tense dynamic saunters Silver (Carolyn Michelle Smith), a woman up from Louisiana with a sharp tongue, an overt sexuality, and a blouse full of cash. Silver doesn’t take crap from anyone and knows how to give as good, if not better, than she gets. She takes an immediate shine to Corn and, looking around at the black-owned businesses in the neighborhood, decides that maybe she wants a piece of that action too — just as Blue is facing pressure to sell his club to the city.

Morisseau’s play is particularly deft at intertwining the drama unfolding among the five characters with the neighborhood’s impending destruction, suffusing everything with an air of despair even as, moment for moment, the play is often quite funny. Under Awoye Timpo’s direction, the comedy and tragedy cut with equal sharpness, allowing the actors to dive into their characters and come up with nuanced performances all around. Blue could very easily be simply unlikeable as a character, even the play’s villain, but Williams is able at every turn to show the fragility underneath the aggression that makes him pitiable even at his most hateful. Brown shows the strength within Corn’s easygoing charm. Fulton steals a scene or two with a gift for physical comedy, and is able to turn it on a dime to show his character’s own raw ambitions, especially as the play builds toward its harrowing conclusion.

But Paradise Blue belongs to the women in the play, as they grapple with their own pasts and their places as black women in America in 1949 — which, in Morisseau’s eyes, was only slightly more grindingly difficult than it is at present. At the beginning of the play, Pumpkin has mostly accepted her fate, making the best she can of the very limited opportunities available to her. Silver, meanwhile, has decided to live in open defiance of the multiple systems of oppression bearing down on her, and mostly accepts the consequences of that defiance. Over the course of the play, however, both Pumpkin and Silver start to reevaluate the decisions they’ve made, putting them on a collision course with each other. That moment, when it comes, is the play at its best. Morisseau’s script glows red hot, and Smith and Odette as actors know exactly what to do with it. The words that flew between them elicited gasps from the audience, not only because of their shock value in the context of the play, but because of the excoriating questions they ask. How much abuse are women supposed to take at the hands of men? And we’re told so often, as a placating platitude, that retaliatory violence never solves anything. But is that really true?

Paradise Blue runs at Long Wharf Theatre, 222 Sargent Dr., through Dec. 16. Visit Long Wharf’s website for tickets and more information.