In theater, a character can get the idea to change her life, and then do it, all within a single scene. In great theater, those swerves aren’t just believable but right and necessary even as they surprise. An intricate concoction of situation, personalities, togetherness and time compels change, as if the laws of chemistry couldn’t have it otherwise.
In one of the best scenes in Dominique Morisseau’s “Paradise Blue,” whose wonderful Aurora Theatre Company production opened Thursday, Feb. 2, Pumpkin (Anna Marie Sharpe) marches in having just recommitted herself to being “a go-along gal.” She might admit to herself that her partner, Blue (Titus VanHook), has demons and doesn’t treat her as well as he could, and she might disagree with his ideas about what to do with his jazz club, Paradise, in Detroit’s Black Bottom neighborhood, which racist city leaders are calling blighted. But stand up for herself, backed by lawlessness, or even a physical threat? “I like soft words and taking care of folks,” she says. She couldn’t become that other kind of woman.
And yet by the end of the scene, Pumpkin becomes that kind of woman — at least for a little while, before she tries to walk herself back to more comfortable terrain.
Newcomer Silver (Rolanda D. Bell), with her red and black lingerie and wads of cash, a walk that makes men fall out of their chairs and an air of imperturbable mystery, knows just when to coax, poke, question, retreat, then move in for the kill: “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.”
In Aurora’s production, the theatrical planets have aligned. To Morisseau’s ace dialogue — taut debate, penetrating character study, lofty yet earthy poetry and careening locomotive all at once — director Dawn Monique Williams brings both micro and macro sensitivity. She communicates precisely how the temperature changes beat by beat: how one line emasculates, how another shines a light in shadow, how a third reveals such sorrowful surrender that Pumpkin’s shoulders seem to drop off a cliff. At the same time, each moment of fine tuning helps the whole play crescendo to a final moment of harrowing decision where somehow each of the play’s quintet feels like the main character.
Her cast members, attired in ’40s snazziness by costume designer Maggie Morgan, create moments of skin-prickling, nerve-tightening electricity. In an uproarious scene when Corn, the pianist in Blue’s band, courts the sexually confident Silver, actor Michael J. Asberry makes his character so nervous you think he might start to cry like a little boy. He can barely blubber out replies, and even then his life has to flash before his eyes first.
Kenny Scott, who’s rapidly distinguishing himself as one of the most capable young actors in the Bay Area, divines musicianship from the spoken word as P-Sam, the band’s drummer. He makes each line a jazz solo, a tiny little pause as potent a tool as a banshee’s wail. He can get laughs just from the way he silently dives into a bowl of grits.
And Sharpe gives a performance of pure heart and acute intelligence. She makes Pumpkin a woman who tries to sublimate feeling but who bubbles over with hope and love. She shines, and somehow her husband is the only one who can’t see it — who probably never listens to her recite poetry the way the other men in the play do.
If Blue’s arc relies more than others’ do on predictable tropes — cycles of abuse and trauma, the tortured artist — a line in the script suggests we ought not focus too much on the club’s proprietor: “This club belong to everybody who done had a piece in keepin’ it alive,” P-Sam says.
Property owners and city leaders might be the parties who sign on the dotted line when a neighborhood’s fate is in question, but “Paradise Blue” makes a strong case that the people who live, breathe, make music, bring joy and look after a corridor own something much greater.
N“Paradise Blue”: Written by Dominique Morisseau. Directed by Dawn Monique Williams. Through Feb. 26. Two hours, 30 minutes. $20-$75. Aurora Theatre Company, 2081 Addison St., Berkeley. 510-843-4822. https://auroratheatre.org