Our theater column for May is all about the transformational power and strength of community as told through stories from playwrights at the top of their game.
On Right Now Paradise Blue, Studio Theatre
Showing May 1 – June 8
www.studiotheatre.org
Detroit, 1949: Albert Cobo has just won the mayoral chains and plans to wield the blunt axe that’s the newly legislated Federal Housing Act to destroy what he considers unsightly blights on the city like the Black Bottom neighborhood and its entertainment hub Paradise Valley. Blue’s a talented but haunted trumpet player whose popular music venue, Paradise Club, is directly in line for Cobo’s wrecking ball. Pumpkin’s devoted to Blue but torn between her loyalty to him and her love for her community, which would be eradicated if Paradise Club is wiped off the map to make space for yet another whites-only neighborhood. Enter Silver, a mysteriously seductive widow who threatens to upend Blue’s plans to sell his club and finally bid farewell to the ghosts of his past.
This is the scene set by Dominique Morisseau in Paradise Blue. Written in the same year as Morisseau’s Sunset Baby, the playwright once again effortlessly conjures into life an effervescent community where jazz, bebop, blues and poetry are as much central characters in the play as are Blue (Amari Cheatom), Pumpkin (Kalen Robinson), Silver (Anji White), Corn (Marty Austin Lamar) and P-Sam (Ro Boddie). Raymond O. Caldwell returns to DC as Director after leaving for LA where he’s Artistic Director at The Fountain Theatre. Morisseau’s play is his love letter to the city he called home for 18 years. “I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the erasure and rewriting of history, and I think about Black history and the way it’s often forgotten, particularly our lived community spaces. This play is a beautiful exploration of that.”
Studio’s Victor Shargai Theatre will become a recreation of Blue’s Paradise Club, says Caldwell. “I wanted to make the bar, seat the audience at the bar so that the audience must grapple with a history that is no more. In that moment, we ostensibly become ghosts. We are the ghosts of the future lingering in that space as we watch the ghosts of the past grapple with the history that’s inevitable.” Caldwell has experimented with chronology as he’s injected snippets of contemporary jazz into Blue’s onstage repertoire. He explains how he’s relished the technical and conceptual challenges of directing a play where the audience is both present (Blue occasionally acknowledges our presence with a fleeting glance, for example) and absent. “I love to watch Black characters grapple with what the advancement of their community looks like. It’s interesting to watch capitalism slowly begin to weave its way into this world. What is the role of community in the face of capitalism? It inspires a conversation that’s uncomfortable at moments.”
In the Spotlight We Are Gathered, Arena Stage
Showing May 16 – June 15
www.arenastage.org
If you loved Tarell Alvin McCraney’s Academy Award-winning cinematic masterpiece Moonlight, then you’ll love We Are Gathered. The Steppenwolf Theatre Ensemble member from Florida once again knits together a richly embroidered community inhabited by characters that love, laugh, lie and learn valuable lessons about themselves and each other.
The concept of community plays an outsized role in much of McCraney’s work. His writing – for stage, TV and film – often touches on the intersection of individual and collective choice and responsibility in communities of color. We Are Gathered tells the story of romantic partners Free (played by Nicholas L. Ashe) and W. Tre (Kyle Beltran) who must make an important decision as they wander into a shadowy woodland that evokes the kingdom of Theseus and Hippolyta in William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The play is being directed by Kent Gash (Director of the New Studio on Broadway at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts Department of Drama), who’s collaborated with McCraney before on Choir Boy in 2015 and Wig Out! in 2017.
Gash is excited to be bringing his considerable talents to a play that’s “…full of joy and affirmation of what it is to be alive. Tarell is a brilliant writer. It’s a powerfulpiece.” Like August Wilson, Gash says, McCraney’s work illuminates lives that might otherwise live only in shadow. “If you’re a Black artist, what you confront in art making is that often your story is not occupying the center of the space.” We Are Gathered will be produced on Arena’s Fichandler Stage in the round, with audience being able to affirm their love for each other during select performances as part of Arena Stage’s Love Takes Center Stage initiative.
We Are Gathered asks an important question: What does contemporary Queer commitment look like? “We hope to blur the line between the audience and the company on stage so that we create a sense of community the way that great weddings often do. When you witness two souls committing to express their love for each other for the rest of their lives, that’s a powerful act.” Gash explains. It won’t be lost on DMV audiences that this play takes to the stage at the same time as several states prepare legal challenges to Obergefell v. Hodges. While not framed as a political play, Gash acknowledges that “…the fact that you survive is political. I feel compelled to make the work to celebrate all the ancestors whose shoulders we stand on.”
Sign up to have your love story profiled during a performance at arenastage.org/lovestory.
Catch before Closing Choke, Sucede hasta en las mejores familias, GALA Hispanic Theatre
Showing April 24 – May 18
www.galatheatre.org
Los Angeles based playwright Emilio T. Infante’s story about a feuding Hispanic family overshadowed by a toxic threat so entranced Gustavo Ott that he brought it with him from Teatro Dallas when he ed GALA Hispanic Theatre as their Artistic Director in early 2024.
Theatre’s Choke, Sucede hasta en las mejores familias. Image courtesy GALA Hispanic Theatre.
It’s community and family – in this case Esperanza and Gonzalo Guerrero, their adult daughter Cassandra and her wife Zulema – that are the apertures through which the audience confronts weighty issues like environmental justice and the politics of immigration, assimilation, tradition and belonging. “What happens to a community also happens to the family and the country.” declares Ott, who is taking up the Director’s chair for this production. “The ideas that we love and the ideas we hate, they all start with the family.”
Ott views this funny, fraught and insightful play in the same genre as Arthur Miller, Edward Albee and Tennessee Williams in its framing of contemporary political debate through community and family relationships. “His (Infante’s) militant approach to society goes into the theater he writes but he does it through metaphor that goes beyond theater, to tradition. I think he has a bright future as a playwright.” High praise indeed, and more than enough reason to watch it.
