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Paradise Blue by Dominique Morisseau at the Signature Theater

Coco Chanel is credited as saying, "Before you leave the house, look in the mirror and take one thing off." 

This is advice Dominique Morisseau should've adhered to when she was writing Paradise Blue.

There is A LOT of ideas tossed around in this play. It's set in 1949 Detroit and deals with racism, gentrification, being haunted by familial history, trauma, domestic violence, the roles of women, and well, jazz. If that seems like a lot to swallow in one two and a half hour play, you are correct. And understandably, none of it is really fleshed out. Morisseau introduces a bunch of ideas that are just half-baked. 

There's a lot to mine from an African American club owner battling with the decision to sell his property in a black area during the time of segregation and Jim Crowe. There's a lot to mine from a musician haunted by the crimes of his father and his own history, something that affects his own music and art. But I didn't think it was explored enough. Pumpkin, Blue's girlfriend and the most interesting character of the play, grapples with her role in this world throughout the play and when it all comes down to it, Morisseau saddles her with a cliched ending. And then there's Silver, the mysterious femme fatale in the play who contributes nothing other than a sexy strut, some great costumes, and well, a gun. She is disappointingly only a device and a contrivance, a red herring, which is a shame because Simone Missick is great in the role and deserves better. (Kristolyn Lloyd as Pumpkin is also terrific.) 

You'd think with all of this going on that Paradise Blue would be compelling but sadly, it is not. Forty-fives minutes in I couldn't help but think, "is there a plot to this play?" The pacing is surprisingly slow, and it doesn't build to heights high enough to justify the slow beginning. In fact, the longer the play goes on, the less interesting it becomes because it starts to embrace cliche. And Morisseau does what many less-accomplished playwrights tend to do: resort to histrionics and violence. Because it's the easy way out. The ending of Paradise Blue is unearned and confusing; why would this character result to that? Why would that happen? (I know why it would happen in that moment but there's nothing the justify the character doing it.) It's particularly baffling because there's no clear conflict in the play, which is a problem I have with a lot of new plays these days. There is rich material here, and the conflict should be that whatever Blue chooses to do is going to have great repercussions on the other characters but it's not explored enough. Morisseau instead focuses on poetic language and tries to embrace the conventions of jazz and music in her language but it feels forced and kind of, well, cheesy. I hate to bring up Suzan-Lori Parks here (I mean she is the best, why wouldn't I?) but she's had way more experience and success with different forms of language in her plays. I would've loved to see her write something like Paradise Blue instead.

Again, the material is rich here. There is a there there. But if Morisseau dropped a few underdeveloped plot points, she could've fleshed the others out and had a great play.

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