PARADISE BLUE Teacher Information Packet by Long Wharf Theatre

T EACHER INF ORM AT ION PACKET

2018-19 SEASON

TEACHER INFORMATION PACKET Compiled and Written by: Long Wharf Education Staff

EDUCATION

LAYOUT BY CLAIRE ZOGHB

T EACHER INF ORM AT ION PACKET

JO SH U A BORE NS T E IN managing director

18 19

By Dominque

Morisseau

Directed by

Awoye Timpo NOVEMBER 21 – DECEMBER 16, 2018

LONG WHARF THEATRE GRATEFULLY ACKNOWLEDGES THE GENEROSITY OF OUR EDUCATION SUPPORTERS

ANNA FITCH ARDENGHI TRUST FREDERicK A. D e LUCA FOUNDATION THE ETHEL & ABE LAPIDES FOUNDATION, INC. henry nias foundation, inc. THEATRE FORWARD WELLS FARGO FOUNDATION yale repertory theatre

FOR THE FIRST-TIME THEATREGOER Long Wharf TheatRE hopes that your first time at the theatRE is magical and life changing, but there aRE A few rules we invite you to follow on this new experience.

Please DO arrive early. Make considerations for traffic, parking, waiting in line, having your ticket taken, and finding your seat. If you need to pick up your tickets from the box office, it is a good idea to arrive at least twenty minutes early. Generally, you can take your seat when “the house is open,” about half an hour before the show begins. Late seating is always distracting and usually not allowed until intermission or a transition between scenes.

Please DO turn off your cell phone. Phones and any other noise-making devices should be switched off before you even enter the theatre. The intermission is a good time to use your phone, but remember to turn it off again before the next act begins.

Please DON’T leave your garbage in the theatre. Food and drinks are usually not permitted during student matinees expect for bottled water. Be sure to throw out your trash in a garbage can or recycling bin in the lobby.

Please WAIT for intermission. Intermission is a great time to get a drink of water, use the bathroom, check your cell phone and talk to your friends about what just happened in the performance. Doing any of these things during the performance often times causes disruption and can mess with the actors’ flow on stage.

Please ENJOY the Show! Actors feed off of you the audience, so don’t be afraid to laugh, clap or cry if it moves you. But reminder everyone engages theater in a different way so please be mindful of your neighbors.

contents A B O U T T H E P L AY

8 Setting

10 Characters

About the Playwright

T H E W O R L D O F T H E P L AY

Paradise Valley

The 1943 Detroit Race Riot

Mayor Albert Cobo

The Poetry of Paradise Blue

S U P P L E M E N TA L M AT E R I A L S

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Monterey Memories

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ABOUT THE PLAY

SETTING

Where does the play take place?

aradise Blue takes place in Detroit, Michigan in a small Black community formerly known as Black Bottom on the downtown strip known as Paradise Valley. The year is 1949.

In this historical photo, a group stands outside of a drugstore on the corner of St. Aubin and Mullett streets on May 8, 1950 in Black Bottom, an area that was torn down in the 1950s to make way for the Chrysler Freeway and the Detroit Medical Center. (Burton Collection.)

In this historical photo, neighbors enjoy their front porches on May 8, 1950 located at 1981 Mullett St. in Black Bottom. (Burton Collection.)

Two men wait outside 2135 Mullett St. on May 8, 1950 in Black Bottom, the ancestral neighborhood of many metro Detroit African-Americans. (Burton Collection.)

In this historical photo, a woman walks past 963 E. Lafayette St. on July 22, 1949 in Black Bottom before it was torn down in the 1950s to make way for the Chrysler Freeway and the Detroit Medical Center. (Burton Collection.)

CHARACTERS

Who are the people in the play?

BLUE

Black man. Early to mid 30’s. Handsome. Mysterious. Sexy. Quiet danger. A hard shell and a hard interior. Battling many demons. A gifted trumpeter.

PUMPKIN

Black woman. Late 20’s. Pretty in a plain way. Simple. Sweet. Waitress, cook and caretaker of the Paradise Club. A loving thing with a soft touch. Adores poetry.

CORN

(aka Cornelius) Black man. Late 40’s to early 50’s. Slightly chubby. Easygoing and thoughtful. A real sweetheart with a weakness for love. The piano man.

P-SAM

(aka Percussion Sam) Black man. Mid/Late 30’s. Busybody. Sweet-talker. Hustler. Always eager for his next gig. The percussionist.

SILVER

Black woman. Mid/late 30’s. Mysterious. Sexy. Charming. Spicy woman. Gritty and raw in a way that men find irresistible. Has a meeeeeaaaannnn walk.

J. Alphonse Nicholson and Kristolyn Lloyd in Paradise Blue at New York City’s Signature Theatre, 2018. Photo by Joan Marcus.

ABOUT THE PLAYWRIGHT

Dominique Morisseau

Dominique Morisseau Is Telling the Story of Her People By Suzy Evans January 2016 https://www.americantheatre.org/2016/01/04/dominique-morisseau-is-telling-the-story-of-her-people/

oots and hollers fill the room as Dominique Morisseau enters New York City’s Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater for the 2015 Steinberg Playwright Awards. She waves and blushes slightly as she walks down the aisle to her front-row seat and her friends call after her. She doesn’t always get this much attention, but tonight she’s accepting one of two $50,000 annual awards the Steinberg Charitable Trust awards to playwrights (the other honoree is Branden Jacobs-Jenkins).

Kamilah Forbes introduces her; the two go back 15 years, when Morisseau submitted one of her first plays to the Hip-Hop Theater Festival, of which Forbes is producing artistic director. In 2013, Forbes directed the U.S. premiere of Morisseau’s Sunset Baby at Labyrinth Theater Company. In her affectionate speech for her friend and colleague, Forbes listed three things that come to mind when she thinks of Morisseau: viral videos, Facebook posts, and silver hoop earrings.

The first is a reference to Morisseau’s famous wedding video, which garnered half a million hits on YouTube since its posting in the summer of 2013. It shows her and her husband, hip-hop artist Jimmy Keys, blowing up the reception dance floor to a medley of tunes. The second is a callout to Morisseau’s vibrant presence on social media, where she writes extensive, poetic posts on the state of race relations, gender equity, civil liberties, and more.

ABOUT THE PLAYWRIGHT continued

Samantha Soule, De’Adre Aziza, and Michelle Wilson in “Detroit ‘67” at the Public Theater.

And the third? Well, she’s always wearing her hoops. She’s sporting them when I meet her at the Lark Play Development Center the next day. (“These aren’t as big as I’d like them to be,” she says with a laugh, demonstrating that while she can get one wrist through the hoop, she’d prefer earrings big enough for both arms.) As we walk into the building, she greets everyone with a hug and a smile, from the security guard to the receptionist. Everyone knows her name, and each greeting is accompanied by a long-held embrace, as she’s just returned to the city after spending seven months in L.A. on the writing staff of the Showtime series Shameless. “Gimme some love!” Morisseau says to one and all. 12

The Lark is one of the places she got her start, acting in Katori Hall’s The Mountaintop and later receiving a yearlong Playwright of New York (PoNY) fellowship. Now her work is everywhere: She is on American Theatre’s list of the 20 most-produced playwrights for the 2015–16 season, with 10 productions of her work happening across the country. The final installment in her Detroit trilogy, Skeleton Crew, premieres at the Atlantic Theater Company in New York City (Jan. 6–Feb. 14). This play cycle spotlights three moments in the history of the city where Morisseau was raised. Detroit ’67, which premiered in 2013 in a three-way coproduction between the Public Theater, the National Black Theater, and the Classical Theater of Harlem, is set during the city’s bruising 1967

(Photo by Joan Marcus)

riots. Paradise Blue is a jazz-filled exploration of Paradise Valley, where music icons like Duke Ellington and Ella Fitzgerald performed in the late ’40s before the neighborhood was shut down due to so-called urban renewal projects. And finally, Skeleton Crew is set in 2008 at a small stamping plant amid the downturn of the auto industry. “Dominique is a healer,” says Ruben Santiago-Hudson, who directed Paradise Blue at the Williamstown Theatre Festival over the summer and will helm Skeleton Crew. “There’s a disease in African-American communities—it’s a metaphor in a sense, but it’s a reality that I face—and the disease is ignorance. We rarely get to see AfricanAmerican people at the center of the world, the salt-of-the-earth, wonderful, angry, joyous, loving,

beautiful people. Dominique takes the marginalized people—not just marginalized in America, marginalized even in the AfricanAmerican community—and gives them a story, gives them a voice. So she heals that disease.” Santiago-Hudson lived in Detroit for five years while in graduate school, and says he was attracted to Morisseau’s work because it put Detroit “in a human light.” For her part, Morisseau was inspired to dramatize Detroiters after reading the works of Pearl Cleage—a Detroit-raised playwright, essayist, novelist, and poet—and the plays of August Wilson.

possess “pieces and shreds and glimpses of people who have raised Dominique, who she loves and cares for fiercely.” “We speak in poetry,” Morisseau says of her family and her husband’s family. “They’re not trying to be poets; it’s just something a little more obscure and specific about how they’re talking. It’s very colorful language. I’ve never thought about why it is; it’s just how I hear it.

wrote Detroit ’67. “I pretty much jacked their memories,” she says. “It has a lot of my own family history spilled throughout the play.” Still, she’s shocked how often people ask her if she wrote the play in response to such current events as the deaths by law enforcement of Eric Garner, Michael Brown, and others.

What she loves about Wilson’s work, she says, is “the way he captures the jazz, and the way his people spoke in Pittsburgh. I thought how affirmed they must be when they read his work; they must feel so visible. I wanted to do that for Detroit, mostly because I felt that the narrative I know about the city is not visible. And I want to address the stuff that has been a conflict for us in the way that August Wilson did, and be a griot, a storyteller for them.” Though she was raised in Detroit, her mother’s family is from Mississippi, and her father’s family is from Haiti, so Southern and Caribbean language fill her vocabulary. She heard phrases like “gotta get some vittles in that tummy” from her grandmother, or, one she put into Skeleton Crew, “If you’re feeling froggy, go on and leap,” which she stole from her husband, whose family also comes from Mississippi. As Forbes notes in her Steinberg speech, the characters in Morisseau’s plays

Kristolyn Lloyd and Blair Underwood in “Paradise Blue” at Williamstown Theatre Festival. (Photo by T. Charles Erickson)

er family was also crucial to her research for the Detroit trilogy, as she wrote the plays largely to learn more about her city and in the process learned more about her relatives, as well. She had no idea, for instance, that her uncle was a journalist during the 1967 riots. He essentially became her “teacher” while she

“I’m like, ‘Did I write a play called Detroit ’67 because of what’s happening now? No, I wrote it because of what was happening in 1967!’” says Morisseau. “I had no idea that it was about to be mirroring what’s happening now. I’m just wondering, how many more plays are we going to have to write before that is a past and not a present?” Kwame Kwei-Armah directed Detroit ’67 in New York, and this season the play will appear at Center > 13

ABOUT THE PLAYWRIGHT continued

Stage in Baltimore, where he’s artistic director, with Forbes at the helm. He had initially slated a different play, but after the death of Freddie Gray in police custody and subsequent protests in Baltimore, he reached for Morisseau’s play. While the play visits a painful and unfortunately recurring chapter of black history, Kwei-Armah feels that the playwright goes further than simply portraying her culture’s internal conflicts. “It’s really easy to celebrate our dysfunction as a community, and the majority theatregoer—our white brethren and sistren—sometimes fascinate at our own destruction,” Kwei-Armah concedes. “Dominique tends to be very much aware of that. So she’s writing not to perpetuate the stereotype, but she’s writing out of a truth in order to ask a political question of the community that she comes from: How can we do better?” Morisseau is certainly aware of the media-perpetuated stereotypes surrounding her hometown, which is one reason she wanted to reclaim its stories on her own terms. She recalls the time a teacher at University of Michigan, where she studied acting with her nowhusband, asked students to call out words to describe Detroit. One adjective, “degenerate,” made Morisseau and Keys weep in each other’s arms. “I definitely think people come in with assumptions about Detroit,” Morisseau says of her play’s audiences. “Detroiters know that people feel negatively about the city, so they’re very particular about who’s going to write us. When I tell 14

Harvey Gardner Moore and DeWanda Wise in Morisseau’s “Sunset Baby” at Labyrinth Theater Company. (Photo by Monique Carboni) people from Detroit that I’m writing about the city, the first thing they say is, ‘Okay, make us look good now.’ And I’m like, ‘Why? That’s not an interesting play!’ I’m not going to do that. But what I promise is: I’m not going to make you look bad. I’m going to make you look human. Because that’s what we are.”

hat humanity extends beyond the Motor City. Morisseau recently went to Russia with the Lark for a Translation Project with her play Skeleton Crew. While Russian artists strongly identified with her story of oppressed workers struggling to find meaning, the process of translation and production was “mind-blowing” and “rough.” “There’s not a lot of black actors over there,” says Morisseau. “I ended up having an all-white

Russian cast for my play about black people in Detroit.” While she admits that the experience was “upsetting—it became profound for me,” the issue of language was also fraught, as many terms in Morisseau’s plays are culturally specific. “I battled with them a lot about translating and not saying certain words and phrases in my play that were no longer applicable—especially words that were very specific to black American culture that would be offensive if said outside of that community.” Morisseau says she hates the adjective “universal” (“Aren’t all stories universal?”), but there is undeniably something about her work that transcends the immediate situations of her characters. KweiArmah recalls a moment from an early workshop for Detroit ’67 when he compared her play to Chekhov, and the team got defensive for a moment.

“Someone said to me, ‘Yeah, but it’s black, right? You’re not saying it’s not black?’” remembers KweiArmah, who is black British. “The way this sister loves her brother too much, and his negotiation with the frustration of being loved and overprotected, is totally Chekhovian, but coming from a British voice, it sounded like I was trying to deny something.” That’s not what he meant, of course, but he chalks up the moment to “her precision when it comes to representing her city.” Morisseau also comes at her work from an actor’s perspective; acting was her first love, and she continues to pursue acting roles. While she hasn’t been in any of her plays yet—and says she would never act in a premiere of her work—there is a list of characters she’d like to play (some of them are the men in her plays). And whether she covets them or not, she does set out to write roles actors will want to play. In her Steinberg acceptance speech, she thanks “the actors who develop my work and then don’t get the opportunity to be in its world premiere.” It’s an experience she knows all too well: She worked for years on Hall’s The Mountaintop. Indeed, Hall essentially wrote the role of the hotel maid who has an imagined encounter with Martin Luther King Jr. for Morisseau, who performed it throughout all the initial workshops. But when the play became a commercial property, star actors were cast in London and then Broadway (Lorraine Burroughs and Angela Bassett, respectively). A

Larry Powell and Dominique Morisseau in “The Mountaintop” at Actors Theatre of Louisville. (Photo by Bill Brymer) golden opportunity had seemed to slip away. “It just felt like mine,” Morisseau says of the role of Camae, but out of the heartbreak she learned “that nothing really belongs to any of us. It sounds tragic, but not really. It really taught me that our job as actors is to tell the story, and especially with new writers, it’s to help them develop their work and touch it and make it better. If the work is intended for us, it will come back to us.” (And it did: Morisseau performed the role at Kentucky’s Actors Theatre of Louisville in 2013.)

he acting impulse is what drove her to playwriting. She wrote her first play because of the lack of roles for

her in college, where she felt marginalized as one of three black women in a program that didn’t produce works of color or support nontraditional casting at the time. So she wrote The Blackness Blues: Time to Change the Tune, A Sister’s Story (she also directed, choreographed, performed in, produced, and designed lights for it). The response was overwhelming. “I remember students were rushing to try to get in, and one of my classmates said to me, ‘Hey Dominique, hook me up!’” she recalls. “I was thinking, Hook me up? That’s what we say when we’re trying to get into the hot party. And I was like, ‘Oh my God, my play is the hot party!’ I’m sold; I’m doing this for life.”

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ABOUT THE PLAYWRIGHT continued

She still has that inner fire. For many years, she worked as a teaching artist with City University of New York’s Creative Arts Team. At the Steinberg Awards, Morisseau recalls a time when her City University mentor and boss, Gwendolen Hardwick, wanted to speak with Morisseau’s Michigan professor Glenda Dickerson about her. Morisseau says she was nervous; she worried that Dickerson might not remember her fondly from school, because she was “angry”

then. “Sometimes a little anger is necessary,” Hardwick told her. “I can’t tell you the magnitude of those words for me,” Morisseau says from the podium at the Newhouse, to loud shouts of affirmation from the crowd. “I am an artist. I am a writer. Until those words, I had carried a shame for my anger—an anger that, though warranted and justified, was a burden to which I felt misunderstood and socially unaccepted. Never mind the

provocation of my anger—that never seemed to matter. The anger alone was my sin. “Now as a playwright, that anger is my liberation. It is my passion for justice. It is power. It is characters who I love deeply. It is beauty, imagination, activism. It is theatre.” And the crowd says amen.

In the Classroom DISCUSSION: Dominique Morisseau uses her own upbringing as inspiration for her plays. Would you consider creating art that was based on your personal experience? Why or why not? GOING FURTHER: Imagine that you are going to write a play that takes place in your hometown. Would it take place in a park? A school? A restaurant? Who would the characters be? Write a description for the opening of this play. Try to convey the sights, sounds, and smells that might be in that space.

THE WORLD OF THE PLAY

PARADISE VALLEY Excerpts from the Detroit Historical Society entry written by Shelley Griffith. https://detroithistorical.org/learn/encyclopedia-of-detroit/paradise-valley

Paradise Valley was the business district and entertainment center of a denselypopulated African-American residential area in Detroit — known as Black Bottom — from the 1920’s through the 1950’s.

uring the 1920’s, the black population in Detroit swelled from 41,000 to 120,000 as new migrants from the South arrived daily to seek employment in the automobile industry. The cramped near east side neighborhood of Black Bottom was one of the very few areas black people were allowed to reside. The residents’ daily needs were amply met by more than 300 black-owned businesses in Paradise Valley, ranging from drugstores, beauty salons and restaurants to places of leisure such as nightclubs, bowling alleys with bars, theaters and mini-golf courses. The nightclubs and theaters in Paradise Valley were a primary source of income for the residents of the impoverished neighborhood. Black-owned nightclubs

booked popular black artists and attracted mixed-race audiences to shows. White people ventured to the Valley to hear Ethel Waters, Pearl Bailey, Ella Fitzgerald and the Inkspots. The Paradise Theatre, opened in 1941, was the place to hear jazz greats such as Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong, and Dizzy Gillespie. After the race riots of 1943, white people became reluctant to venture to Paradise Valley and mixed audiences became rare. Urban renewal programs and the construction of freeways in the 1960’s abruptly halted life in Paradise Valley and the Black Bottom neighborhood. Automobile manufacturers outgrew city factories and relocated to new sites in suburban areas such as Livonia, Wayne and

Dearborn. Expressways were needed to make it easier for workers to commute from Detroit to the suburban plants. Consequently, the Chrysler Freeway was built and paved over much of Paradise Valley. Today’s Lafayette Park is the on the former site of Black Bottom. A portion of Paradise Valley is now Ford Field. Paradise Theatre, the jazz mecca of the 40’s and 50’s, has been renovated and is now Orchestra Hall and home to the Detroit Symphony Orchestra.

Many neighborhoods in Detroit were displaced by the building of freeways and the projects of urban renewal, but Paradise Valley suffered the largest losses. Although it was difficult for displaced blacks to find new housing, many purchased property in the old Jewish neighborhood along Twelfth Street. Many of the former residents kept pictures of the old neighborhood and these have helped keep the memory alive of the once vibrant Paradise Valley community.

THE 1943 DETROIT RACE RIOT https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1943_Detroit_race_riot

he 1943 Detroit race riot took place in Detroit, Michigan from the evening of June 20 through the early morning of June 22. The race riot was ultimately suppressed by the use of 6,000 federal troops. It occurred in a period of dramatic population increase and social tensions associated with the military buildup of World War II, as Detroit’s automotive industry was converted to the war effort. Existing social tensions and housing shortages were exacerbated by the arrival of nearly 400,000 migrants, both AfricanAmerican and White Southerners, from the Southeastern United States between 1941 and 1943. The new migrants competed for space and jobs, as well as against white European immigrants and their descendants. The Detroit riot was one of three that summer; it followed one in Beaumont, Texas, earlier that month, in which white shipyard workers attacked black men after a rumor that a white woman had been raped; and preceded a riot in Harlem, New York, where a group of black people attacked white-owned property in their neighborhood after rumors that a black soldier had been killed by a white policeman. In this wartime period, there were also racial riots in Los Angeles, California, and Mobile, Alabama. The rioting in Detroit began among youths at Belle Isle Park on June 20, 1943; the unrest moved into the city proper and was exacerbated by false rumors of racial 20

attacks in both the black and white communities. It continued until June 22. It was suppressed after 6,000 federal troops were ordered into the city to restore peace. A total of 34 people were killed, 25 of them black and most at the hands of white police or National Guardsmen; 433 were wounded, 75 percent of them black; and property valued at $2 million ($27.5 million in 2015 US dollars) was destroyed, most of it in the black area of Paradise Valley, the poorest neighborhood of the city. At the time, white commissions attributed the cause of the riot to “black hoodlums and youths.” The NAACP identified deeper causes: a shortage of affordable housing, discrimination in employment, lack of minority representation in the police, and white police brutality. A late 20th-century analysis of the rioters showed that the white rioters were younger and often unemployed (characteristics that the riot commissions had falsely attributed to black [ep[;e, despite evidence in front of them). If working, the whites often held semi-skilled or skilled positions. They traveled long distances across the city to join the first stage of the riot near the bridge to Belle Isle Park, and later traveled in armed groups explicitly to attack the black neighborhood. The black rioters were often older, established city residents, who in many cases had lived in the city for more than a decade. Many were married working men, and many were defending their homes and neighborhood against police and white rioters.

MAYOR ALBERT COBO https://www.freep.com/story/news/local/2014/08/29/5-worst-mayors-in-detroit-history/14799541/ The following excerpts are from a 2014 article by Dan Austin of the Detroit Free Press.

lbert Cobo was the mayor of Detroit from 1950 to 1957…his policies helped to set the stage for Detroit’s decline and the racial strife that plague the city to this day. Cobo was the driving force behind the development of the city’s Civic Center. The move wasn’t without its critics, of course. A number of historic structures were razed, and, despite a $112-million investment, it did not bring the renaissance that was promised. Still, it was the first time Detroit had really taken advantage of its riverfront and would, decades later, pave the way for the RiverWalk and other beautification projects. In the end, the Civic Center project was a win for Detroit. But Cobo often stoked racial tensions. Keep in mind that the city had not fully healed from the race riot of 1943, and tempers had anything but cooled by the time he took office. Cobo used this sentiment to his advantage…he stoked white people’s fears of the increasingly restive black Detroiters, hinting that he was the only thing “keeping them at bay.” Housing discrimination was rampant in Detroit. And many of Cobo’s policies had a negative effect on housing opportunities for African Americans. He vigorously opposed black public housing because he opposed subsidies for poor people in favor of more private ownership of property. Many accused him, however, of trying to “protect housing values” in white neighborhoods. The Michigan Chronicle characterized the election of Cobo as “one of the most vicious

campaigns of race-baiting and playing upon the prejudices of all segments of the Detroit population.” Scott Martelle, in his book Detroit: A Biography, says that Cobo planned to demolish the slums, home to mostly immigrants and black people, and pay for it by selling the land to developers. “The people who pay taxes want better services for their money,” Cobo said in a radio interview. Martelle wrote: “The key phrase was ‘people who pay taxes.’ Those were primarily property-owning whites; most blacks were renters. Cobo’s word choice was a subtle reinforcement of racial codes ... Cobo was the candidate of the wealthy, and of the white.” Cobo also heavily pushed for the expansion of the expressway system; many of his backers were wealthy white suburbanites, who wanted a faster, easier commute into the city. Cobo’s quest for more and more freeways directly fueled the city’s decline. Instead of making the city more accessible and bringing folks in, it caused the city to bleed out, both population and businesses. The freeways simply made it easier for folks to live elsewhere — where yards were bigger, homes were newer and property was cheaper — yet still work downtown. Many of those freeways that he lobbied

Albert Cobo for went, unsurprisingly, through predominately black neighborhoods. Cobo also was part of the big push that demolished the center of black life in Detroit, Paradise Valley and the Black Bottom. After erasing these neighborhoods from existence starting in 1950, the land would sit unused and overgrown for some five years. Black Detroiters watched their community flattened for an overgrown wasteland of nothingness. Cobo also neglected civil-rights initiatives that would have integrated the city’s black population. Regular police crackdowns targeted black communities, yet he did nothing to stop them. It was not a peaceful time in the city. And it would only get worse. Cobo did not seek re-election, opting instead to run for governor in 1956. He was trounced by Democrat G. Mennen (Soapy) Williams. When he died in the mayor’s office of a heart attack at age 63 on Sept. 12, 1957, the city had already lost more than 150,000 people. When the census came out in 1960, Detroit was down another 30,000 — a 10% decrease since Cobo took office. The slippery slope of decline was well under way. 21

THE POETRY OF PARADISE BLUE

eorgia Douglas Johnson (1880 – 1966) was a poet and playwright during the Harlem Renaissance, as well as a prominent anti-lynching activist.

In Paradise Blue, Pumpkin frequently reads and recites poetry to other characters in the play. In the first scene, she recites a poem by Johnson: The Heart of a Woman By Georgia Douglas Johnson The heart of a woman goes forth with the dawn, As a lone bird, soft winging, so restlessly on, Afar o’er life’s turrets and vales does it roam In the wake of those echoes the heart calls home.

Poet Georgia Douglas Johnson

In the Classroom DISCUSSION: Why do you think Pumpkin is drawn to the work of Georgia Douglas Johnson in particular? Why do you think Dominique Morisseau chose to include poetry as a part of Pumpkin’s character arc? GOING FURTHER: Fill in the blank: The Heart of a ______________. Write your own poem using Johnson’s The Heart of a Woman as a model.

The heart of a woman falls back with the night, And enters some alien cage in its plight, And tries to forget it has dreamed of the stars While it breaks, breaks, breaks on the sheltering bars.

Johnson’s second published collection of poetry, Bronze, featured themes of racial issues, motherhood, being a woman of color, and the ways in which these themes intersected throughout her life. In the foreword of Bronze, Johnson wrote: “Those who know what it means to be a colored woman in 1922 know it not so much in fact as in feeling.” Calling Dreams By Georgia Douglas Johnson The right to make my dreams come true, I ask, nay, I demand of life; Nor shall fate’s deadly contraband Impede my steps, nor countermand; Too long my heart against the ground Has beat the dusty years around; And now at length I rise! I wake! And stride into the morning break!

SUPPLEMENTAL MATERIALS

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monterey memories

The following excerpt is from a 2018 article by Brian Slattery of New Haven Independent https://www.newhavenindependent.org/index.php/archives/entry/conncat_swings_jazz_past/

tanding in front of a movie screen on Thursday night at ConnCAT in Science Park, filmmaker Frank Mitchell recognized a lot of familiar faces in the small but attentive crowd who had come to see Unsung Heroes, his movie about New Haven’s jazz scene. “There are folks in the audience who can tell the entire story themselves,” he said. And soon enough, Allen “Rubbs” Williams, former bartender at the Monterey Club on Dixwell Avenue, would watch a slightly younger version of himself on the screen talk about the history and legacy of New Haven jazz — and offer some insight about how that history might shape the city’s future.

The possibilities branched out from there until ConnCAT had programmed events for every Thursday in February from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. In addition to the Unsung Heroes screening, the event on Feb. 8 will focus on African drumming. Feb. 15 on hip hop culture, and Feb. 22 on the idea that started it all, a panel discussion of What’s Going On. All the events are free and happen at ConnCAT, 4 Science Park, off Winchester Avenue near Division Street. Released in 2001 and using interview footage collected from dozens of people for years before that, Unsung Heroes — produced and directed by Rebecca L. Abbott and written by Abbot and W. Frank Mitchell — tells the story of the rise of jazz in New Haven from the 1920s through its heyday in the years after World War II. It first sets out the conditions that laid the groundwork: an influx of African-American migrants from the Carolinas, drawn to New Haven by the promise of work in its factories, particularly the Winchester factory. This promise went largely filled, and with hard but steady work employing a neighborhood, Dixwell Avenue from its base at Broadway to the city limits became, as the film’s narration puts it, “black New Haven’s Main Street.” “All along Dixwell Avenue, you could go out on a Friday, Saturday night and fall from one club to the other. You could go and listen to what’s going here, then say, ‘let’s go down to the corner and see who’ playing down here,’” said Reginald Jackson, a graphic designer and former drummer.

Genevieve Walker The screening of Unsung Heroes was the first in a series of events ConnCAT is hosting for African American History Month, explained ConnCAT Chief Operating Officer Genevieve Walker before the screening. The idea for the series began when Walker and others at ConnCAT found themselves in a discussion of how uncannily relevant Marvin Gaye’s 1971 masterpiece What’s Going On continued to be today.

“You could go from one end of Dixwell Avenue all the way to the other end of Dixwell Avenue. That was the street. That’s where everybody went, starting from Yale all the way up,” said singer Jodie Meyers Stanford.

he most high-profile club on Dixwell Avenue was the Monterey Club at 265-267 Dixwell Ave. Under the ownership of Rufus Greenlee, a parade of jazz luminaries graced the club’s stage, from Josephine Baker, Billie Holiday, and Sarah Vaughan to Charlie Parker and John Coltrane. There were closed-door jam sessions with Ella Fitzgerald. Johnny “Hammond” Smith recorded a live album there called Black Coffee.

Monetery Café Greenlee was a pillar of the community, insisting on good behavior in the club from patrons and employees and getting it. Williams (in the film) recalled how he could never hang onto money; he was always spending it or lending it, without keeping track of it. Greenlee, his boss, noticed and started asking Williams for money himself, a couple bucks here, a couple bucks there. Williams always gave it to him. After a while Greenlee presented Williams with a bankbook for a savings account with a few hundred dollars in it. It was all the money Greenlee had borrowed from Williams. It was the money Williams couldn’t save; Greenlee had done it for him, and was giving it all back to him. Horace Silver, who grew up in Norwalk and would go on to have a long career as a hard bop composer and pianist in the 1950s, cut his teeth as a high school student at the Monterey. He played tenor sax and piano. “We played two nights a week up there,” he said. “So I’d get through high school at 3 o’clock in the afternoon on Friday, and then 5 or 6 o’clock or so I’d take the train to New Haven, have dinner…. We’d go to the gig, play the gig, and afterwards, we’d come home”

to a musician’s house in New Haven. “We would stay up until 4 or 5 o’clock in the morning, talking music.” But the Monterey was far from alone. There was New Haven jazz legend Willie Ruff’s place, the Playback Club, nearby on Winchester Avenue. Dixon’s Restaurant was on Ashmun Street. There was the Recorder Club and the Golden Gate. The Golden Gate had its stage in the window. “Even if you were too young to go in, you could stand on the sidewalk and be entertained,” Stanford said. In one building was the Musicians’ Club on the second floor and the Democratic Club on the third floor. “And those are the days that I really miss, because it was a home for all the musicians. Any time of day, if a bunch of musicians got together, they could go up the Musicians’ Club. Somebody would have their horn, someone would be on the piano, any time of day or in the evening,” said former drummer Sam Dixon. Drummer Roy Haynes destroyed the drum set one night at the Democratic Club. At Lillian’s Paradise

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Allen “Rubbs” Williams

downtown, “there was a riot,” Silver recalled, with tables and chairs going airborne. The band ended up hiding under the grand piano until the fight died down. The heady atmosphere gave rise to a strong local jazz scene. Dickey Meyers (Jodie’s father) became a hero of the tenor sax, along with Tommy Brazile. Ernie Washington was an “amazing” piano player. The interviewees in Unsung Heroes rattle off a long list of names — trumpet players, bass players, players across the range of instruments, enough to field several bands over. As several interviewers said in the film, New Haven’s musicians were “black, white, yellow, green, purple,” — from a musical perspective, it didn’t matter as long as it was good. The ways that music broke down racial barriers meant that black and white musicians mixed more than the general populace did. A unionized musical landscape that began with two segregated unions — ostensibly for downtown and uptown clubs, but in reality for white and black musicians, respectively — ultimately led to a single union (though, unfortunately, merging the two unions often meant that black musicians got less work than white musicians). It also meant that there was a legacy to hand down. And the Buster Brothers, Eddie and Bobby, who both played organ, became “the heart and soul of jazz music in New Haven,” as the narration put it. They played with the greats that came through town. But they also played with whoever wanted to play with them, and in their knowledge, skill, and enthusiasm, they created a next generation of players. “The first thing that would come out of Eddie’s mouth, or Bobby’s, was ‘where’s your horn? Where’s your horn? Go get it. It’s not going to do any good in the car. Take 26

it out. Bring it in. Let’s jam,” said James “Dinkie” Johnson, who owned Dinkie’s Jazz Club. “They were born mentors, born leaders,” bassist Jeff Fuller said. “They were the foundation of jazz in New Haven.” Unsung Heroes ends on that hopeful note, of a tradition passed down. It holds water. People have built on the foundation the Buster Brothers laid down, with the result that jazz in all its forms is an integral part of New Haven’s musical landscape, even beyond the genre’s borders.

ut the documentary left a few questions open, too. Most important: Maybe the musicians are still here, but what happened to the clubs on Dixwell Avenue? What happened to the crowds that could keep the Monterey packed from 10 a.m. to 1 a.m.? What happened to black New Haven’s Main Street? That was the question that drove the discussion after the screening. “It’s changed so much,” said an audience member about Dixwell Avenue, “and I don’t think we understand the history.” Another audience member started by giving the same answer Willie Ruff gave in an interview not long ago:

W. Frank Mitchell

“The story and the history only live if we keep telling it.” – W. FRANK MITCHELL television. But this audience member kept going. People stopped going out. People started staying home. The bonds of community that were made strong by everyone always seeing everyone else out began to weaken. “As a people, we kind of let our guard down,” she said. Someone else picked up on that point about how television changed things. “We would see things on TV that we couldn’t have,” she said. Before that, “we were poor but didn’t know we were poor.” The change even affected how many people played music. One audience member pointed out that lots of the musicians on the scene were amateur. “They didn’t have TV but they had instruments.” Drugs became another refrain that the audience returned to. Williams recalled that Greenlee had no tolerance for people under the influence of drugs at the Monterey, which at the time meant heroin. His patrons and musicians abided by it. But then marijuana came into vogue, and people accepted it. “It changed some of the attitude about drugs,” he said.

Mitchell then returned to where the film began. “This entire area was full of jobs. You could work all day and then go to a club. You could walk home for lunch,” he said. “Not having steady work in the neighborhood meant you couldn’t have clubs.” Another audience member pointed out how urban renewal projects didn’t strengthen the community like they could have. But what could be done about all that now? How could the legacy be continued? How might jazz, and music, grow again? Here there was some good news. Walker pointed out that jazz was taught in several of New Haven’s schools. Many of the musicians in Unsung Heroes were still around. Yale, with its robust jazz program, was full of possibilities. Questions turned to whether the film could be shown in schools in the city to make students more aware of what the city — or even just what Dixwell Avenue — had once been. Mitchell agreed that was a good idea. After all, he said, “the story and the history only live if we keep telling it.”

READ A REVIEW – THEN WRITE YOUR OWN! The following is a review of a 2018 production of Paradise Blue at the Signature Theatre in New York. Read this review and, after seeing Long Wharf’s production, write your own!

Paradise Blue’s Powerful Grit Theatre Review by Sara Holdren http://www.vulture.com/2018/05/theater-review-paradise-blues-powerful-grit.html

ominique Morisseau’s Paradise Blue — the second installment in the writer’s “Detroit Projects” trilogy and the first production in her current residency at Signature Theatre — is one of those plays that feels, for the most part, powerful when you witness it, and starts to spur more and more questions of character and logic the farther you get from it. That’s not necessarily a dire flaw. The play — which begins with an ominous prologue involving a Chekhov’s gunshot, if not the gun itself — feels fable-like. It’s got the pull of fate to it, an air of moody melodrama that, at least in the moment, helps it gloss over questions of strict behavioral naturalism, of real actions and real consequences, in favor of a lively experimentation with archetypes and genre tropes. In particular, Morisseau is playing with noir, and in Paradise Blue’s most exciting moments, she both digs into our expectations for this kind of smoky, 1940s, damaged-dudes-anddangerous-dames narrative and overturns them. The Blue of the title is a tortured prodigy (a simmering J. Alphonse Nicholson, who can really wail on that horn, plays him with a 28

combination of rageful machismo and wild helplessness). Like his father before him, he’s a trumpet player and the owner of the Paradise Club, a once swingin’, now come-down-in-the-world establishment on the downtown strip known as Paradise Valley in the Black Bottom neighborhood of Detroit in 1949. Blue’s place is “one of the original spots,” beams his bandmate, Corn, a bearish sweetheart of a piano player given kindly solidity by Keith Randolph Smith; “Blue like to say Paradise Valley took its name from him.” We eventually discover the gory family trauma that helped to spawn Blue’s many demons, but even in the play’s early scenes, the club owner and bandleader has all the earmarks of troubled genius: pride, impatience, tempestuous mood swings, insecurity, inflexibility, and of course, a gift so great that listeners to his playing think “he’s talkin’ to God and together they answerin’ my prayers.” At least, so says his girlfriend, the shy, sweet-natured Pumpkin, who spends her days keeping house at the Paradise (the club’s also got a boarding house upstairs) and reciting poetry as she sweeps the floors and brews the coffee. Pumpkin’s not just Blue’s lover;

she’s his waitress and his laundress and his cook and his emotional rock and, when the devil is in him, his victim. She’s also, despite the title, the true heart of Paradise Blue. “The heart of a woman goes forth with the dawn,” Pumpkin muses at the play’s beginning, reading from a book of poems by the Harlem Renaissance writer Georgia Douglas Johnson as she cleans up the bar. Blue might be a genius, but it’s Pumpkin’s going forth that ultimately interests Morisseau. The play’s journey is hers, as Blue’s descent into desperation forces her to discover capacities in herself beyond those of a “go-along gal” who likes “soft words and taking care of folks,” a woman who believes her job is to ease a man’s troubles as much as she can. As Pumpkin, Kristolyn Lloyd makes lovely, gradual work of that character arc. She’s especially a treat to watch in one sequence where, while changing the linens in one of the rooms upstairs, she pulls a boarder’s black bustier out of a drawer and tries it on over her cardigan, striking a vampy pose in the invisible mirror and playing with the idea of being a sexy, indomitable “spider woman.”

Photo by Joan Marcus

Such a woman is the lodger whose lingerie Pumpkin is borrowing. “They call me Silver,” says this stranger when she prowls into the play halfway through Act One. She’s dressed all in black, with a weaponized walk, an irresistible aura of gritty glamour, and a suspiciously dead husband. Blue begrudgingly lets her rent a room (she’s also got plenty of money) but calls her the “black widow.” Silver saunters right out of a Raymond Chandler novel — on her first entrance, the door of the Paradise swings open for her without her touching it, as if a plot-thickening wind is blowing through the room to announce her arrival. Simone Missick commits fully to type as the

silky, smoldering, worldly woman of mystery, but she also brings welcome moments of crass humor and tough-mindedness to the role. She’s not just here to make the eyes of Blue’s bandmates do that cartoon-bulge-out-of-the-headawooga! thing. Nor is she here simply out of her own ambition, though she does have designs on Blue’s club. Dramatically, Silver’s here to teach Pumpkin a lesson, to model for her another way of walking through the world — to show the go-along gal that there was trouble in Paradise long before any spider woman walked through the door. “This fella of yours,” Silver asks Pumpkin, “he be good to you?” Pumpkin responds with a kind of

automatic docile awe that Blue is special and gifted, but Silver cuts her off cold: “That wasn’t my question.” The uneasy relationship that builds between these two women forms the real core of Paradise Blue, as one pushes the other to take back her power. “You a thinkin’ woman with her own words,” Silver insists. “But you play these mens just the same as me. Make ‘em feel safe so they make you feel safe. But doll, ain’t none of us really safe … You want to keep ailin’ with [Blue]? Or you want it to stop? We’ve been trained to value stories like Blue’s, stories of haunted, talented protagonists (usually men) who long to escape their traumatic

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READ A REVIEW – THEN WRITE YOUR OWN! continued

pasts and suffocating surroundings, and who wreak a certain amount of havoc in their pursuit of artistic and personal freedom. But with Silver and Pumpkin, Morisseau flips the script: She gives us a troubled male genius but she doesn’t give him the play. Despite Blue’s talent and despite Morriseau’s own sympathy for the grievous damage that’s been done to him, the story refuses to absolve him of the damage he’s done. It’s a strong stance, especially considering the painfully viable explanations that the characters supply for Blue’s demons: “Blue ain’t a bad man,” sighs Corn. “He just wanna be mighty but the world keep him small. Cost of bein’ Colored and gifted. Brilliant and second class. Make you insane.” Blue thinks that escaping Black Bottom will mean escaping the holes in his soul. His pain has made him hard, and it’s terrible to listen to him degrade the members of his own community, fellow black men and women that he feels are beneath him: This “low-class” population should be sent “back to the outskirts of the city so the rest of us can finally move on up,” he snarls. In the ultimate betrayal of Black Bottom, Blue’s even plotting to sell his club to the city, under the regime of a bigoted new mayor bent on cleaning up urban “blight,” thereby opening the door for the racist gentrification of his neighborhood. “We the blight he talkin’ ’bout,” snaps the drummer for Blue’s bebop combo, P-Sam (a smart,

slick performance by Francois Battiste). P-Sam, who’s got sharp eyes and ambitions of his own, can see his band leader’s treachery coming and can’t forgive Blue for being willing to deliver the Paradise — their home and livelihood — into the hands of “no count crackers that think of me as less than the spilled whiskey on they shoe.” P-Sam wants to save the Paradise. For her own reasons, so does Silver. And in another twist on the conventional story about the One Who Makes It Out, Morisseau shifts her play’s emotional and moral focus to those who are committed to staying. In the end, the play values loyalty over lone wolf-dom, and it exacts a heavy price from Blue for his betrayals. Without giving away Paradise Blue’s dramatic finish entirely, it’s enough to say that that gunshot makes its way back around, eliciting more than a few gasps from the audience. And it’s this climactic gesture that both resounds powerfully in the instant and becomes increasingly problematic in its echoes. Pumpkin — who’s finally shed her cardigan for a red satin gown and her meek hesitancy for an almost exalted sense of righteous certainty — commits an act of violence that’s clearly framed as both self-defense and a kind of divine mercy. The actors throw themselves wholeheartedly into these climactic moments, doing solid, emotionally connected work even when Morisseau’s script moves toward the neatness and sentiment of melodrama. It’s not their playing of the scene or

Santiago-Hudson’s handling of it, which is intense yet measured, that causes cognitive dissonance. It’s the scene itself: Here, Morisseau seems to give in to noir logic — that a beautiful, empowered woman in red who’s arguably in the right can get away with bringing down justice on a man who’s done wrong. But throughout Paradise Blue, Pumpkin has stood for loyalty, kindheartedness, and community: “Every part of this place is who I am,” she tells Blue, speaking of her home in Black Bottom. “It’s killin’ you but it’s keepin’ the rest of us alive.” As I walked away from Paradise Blue, I couldn’t help thinking that Pumpkin’s liberation — so fascinating and so uniquely centered throughout the rest of the play — in the crucial final scene feels more symbolic than actual. In the real world, the action she takes would risk tearing a deep new hole in the very community she hopes to remain in and save. At the very least, it risks tearing a hole in her (though Silver might argue that such wounds are the necessary cost of freedom). Paradise Blue balances somewhere between a truthful portrait of human suffering, awakening, and transformation in a gritty, changing city, and a genre exercise that obscures details of justification and consequence through a glass of dark glamour. Despite the murky fun of a good noir, I prefer the moments when, outside of archetype, I can see the play’s characters clearly.

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ADDITIONAL SOURCES McGraw, Bill. Bringing Detroit’s Blackbottom Back to (Virtual) Life. https://www.freep.com/story/news/local/ michigan/detroit/2017/02/27/detroit-black-bottom-neighborhood/98354122/ February 2, 2017.

Slattery, Brian. Monterey Memories https://www.newhavenindependent.org/index.php/archives/entry/conncat_ swings_jazz_past/ February 2, 2018

Stephens, Judith L. (ed.) The Plays of Georgia Douglas Johnson: From the New Negro Renaissance to the Civil Rights Movement. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2005. ISBN 0252073339.