“The Soul of This Place”: Dominique Morisseau’s Detroit

Abstract

From bop performances in a renowned jazz club and illicit parties hosted in a basement on 12th street, to card games behind the boss’ back in the breakroom of an auto-stamping plant, playwright Dominique Morisseau tells the story of Detroit across three plays that comprise The Detroit Project. Morisseau, the recipient of a MacArthur Genius Grant, describes a social history of rising “the hell up” while going underground. The trilogy has rightfully been compared to August Wilson’s ten-play Pittsburgh Cycle in the way the plays ambitiously set out to tell the intergenerational story of each playwright’s hometown.1 However, unlike Wilson who wrote a play taking place in each decade of the twentieth century, Morisseau sets each play during one of three pivotal moments in the history of Detroit: the beginnings of urban renewal in the 1950s, the Detroit Riots of 1967, and the contemporary economic and infrastructural crisis that accompanies a major decline in the auto industry. Through her use of stage directions, set descriptions, and rhythmic banter that shifts between playful, romantic, and tragic, Morisseau writes in a continuum of spaces that resonates with the presence of Detroit’s Black community and the forces of state and industry that have historically shaped it. Paradise Blue, the award-winning play that opens the trilogy, is set in the same year as the notorious Housing Act of 1949 that would fuel the “urban renewal” campaign of slum clearance in major cities across the United States.2 The play centers on the fate of Paradise Club, owned by a trumpet player called Blue. The club is in the famous jazz town of Paradise Valley at the heart of Black Bottom, a neighborhood branded with the label “blighted,” bearing testimony to the line made famous by James Baldwin: urban renewal “means negro removal.”3 Paradise Blue follows members of a community on the verge of displacement and dispossession by “urban renewal” developers. Individuals in this community have very different plans for the future of the club and, by extension, all of the neighborhood. For Blue, the headstrong club owner and leading trumpet soloist, Paradise Valley and the community it sustains represents a legacy of frustrated ambitions, violence, and poverty that he desperately wants to leave behind. He is haunted by the memory and madness of his father, who killed his mother in a violent fit of anger over the glassceiling limitations of Black life. To escape his memories and his frustrations, Blue is more than happy to sell the place to private developers rather than to those within his own social group. The play thus ends on a note of desperation, betrayal, and violence as all the other businesses in Paradise Valley start selling out and the main characters start to turn on each other, leading to a tragic ending in which Blue is shot. The second play in the trilogy is Detroit ’67, winner of the 2014 Sky Cooper American Play Prize. It picks up eighteen years after Paradise Blue, in a basement on 12th street long after Black Bottom was demolished. The play is set in the days leading up to the notorious Detroit riots of 1967 that pit the Black working-class 1118077 NLFXXX10.1177/10957960221118077New Labor ForumBooks and the Arts research-article2022