Review: Jazz and gentrification square off on Berkeley stage

The much-discussed question in “Paradise Blue,” Dominique Morisseau’s play now onstage at Berkeley’s Aurora Theatre Company, is whether jazz trumpeter Blue is going to sell his family’s nightclub to developers looking to transform Detroit’s Black Bottom and Paradise Valley neighborhoods.

Blue has his own ideas and isn’t going to listen to anyone’s advice, even though the members of the house band’s livelihoods are at stake and his girlfriend/cook/bartender/maid never wants to leave the neighborhood.

Set in 1949, Morisseau’s play isn’t simply a play about gentrification and displacement. It weaves in threads of generational trauma and domestic violence, and it’s also — poetically and quasi-mystically — about jazz.

“Paradise Blue” is part of a three-play cycle called “The Detroit Project” set in different decades in Morisseau’s native city. Aurora produced another play in the trilogy, “Detroit ’67,” in 2018, the same year that Marin Theatre Company and TheatreWorks Silicon Valley had co-produced the other, “Skeleton Crew,” which takes place in 2008.

Morisseau’s Temptations musical “Ain’t Too Proud,” also delving into a bit of Detroit history, premiered in 2017 at Berkeley Repertory Theatre on its way to Broadway and came through San Francisco’s Golden Gate Theatre on tour a few months ago. Her next musical, “Soul Train,” will premiere at American Conservatory Theater this summer.

Aurora associate artistic director Dawn Monique Williams gives the play a sharp and lushly atmospheric staging, accentuated beautifully by Gregory Robinson’s sultry jazz score. (Blue’s soulful trumpet solos are actually played by Bay Area musician Geechi Taylor.)

With intimate lighting by Stephanie Anne Johnson, Stephen C. Jones’s set doesn’t particularly suggest a nightclub other than a looming neon sign and a few appropriately-sized tables. There’s no stage, and no sign of instruments except when Blue walks on with his trumpet. There’s a freestanding doorway, a small wooden counter and a bed in the foreground for some scenes upstairs.

Titus VanHook is compellingly prickly as Blue, short-tempered and standoffish at the slightest hint of debate. Anna Marie Sharpe is his polar opposite as his girlfriend Pumpkin, warm and polite, rapt with enthusiasm whenever she reads and recites poetry.

Kenny Scott especially bristles at the boss’s disregard as drummer P-Sam, short for Percussion Sam, who’s out of work until they find a new bassist to replace the one Blue drove away with his intransigence. Full of gripes and big dreams, Scott’s Sam is electric with energy and also wonderfully funny in a scene where he’s constantly interrupting Pumpkin reciting poetry.

Michael J. Asberry exudes amiable complacency as Cornelius, called Corn, the piano player who’s known Blue since his father ran the club.

Rolanda D. Bell spells trouble as soon as she swaggers in the door to rent a room and shake things up as the smooth-talking and seductive femme fatale Silver. What’s most interesting about Silver as that she’s the obvious focus of suspense and mystery as the provocative new arrival, but she’s not the real source of strife, just one of many catalysts in the mix.

One funny thing about watching Asberry and Scott’s many conversations in this empty nightclub is that just two months ago they were chatting away onstage in an empty diner also fallen on hard times while its cranky owner contemplated selling the building to developers. That was in August Wilson’s “Two Trains Running” at Marin Theatre Company, also directed by Williams — a very different play from Morisseau’s but one with the shared backdrop of the erasure of existing Black neighborhoods through “urban renewal.”

The action simmers steadily, with not much progressing until everything comes to a head awfully suddenly, startlingly so. Instead of step-by-step plot movement, we gradually get to know the characters better, so that when things do happen we have a better sense of where it’s coming from. By then we’re invested in these characters, so captivatingly embodied by the cast, that whatever’s about to happen is almost sure to break our hearts.

Contact Sam Hurwitt at shurwitt@gmail.com, and follow him at Twitter.com/shurwitt.

‘PARADISE BLUE’

By Dominique Morisseau, presented by Aurora Theatre Company

Through: Feb. 26

Where: Aurora Theatre, 2081 Addison Street, Berkeley (also streaming Feb. 21-26)

Running time: Two hours and 30 minutes, one intermission

Tickets: $20-$75; 510-843-4822, www.auroratheatre.org