New Haven Academy Stages ​“Paradise”

All through the play Paradise Blue by Dominique Morisseau — running at New Haven Academy from Oct. 19 to Oct.21 — trumpeter Blue struggles with his music. He’s trying to play just the right note. Some days he gets close. Some days he’s a million miles away. But he’s starting to think he’s never going to get it. It’s an encapsulation of the conditions of his life, the way everything he has is starting to slip away from him. And it’s driving him a little crazy.

“I don’t just want to do musicals,” Ty Scurry said of the decision as a performing arts teacher at New Haven Academy to do Paradise Blue, swiftly becoming a modern classic, with a high-school theater company. Scurry loves musicals, and cut his teeth on them as a student himself at Wilbur Cross High School. But he wanted to give his students the chance to ​“cut the music out and really deal with the story, to deal with the emotions of each character, and how those emotions affect someone else in the show. It makes actors work a little bit.”

This is particularly true given Scurry’s choice of play. Celebrated contemporary playwright Dominique Morisseau’s Paradise Blue centers on Blue, a trumpet player and owner of Paradise, a down-on-its luck jazz club in Black Bottom, a neighborhood in Detroit that was demolished in the late 1950s and early 1960s to make way for a freeway and for redevelopment. Blue struggles as both a musician and a club owner, holding himself to standards he doesn’t know how to meet, and living in the shadow of childhood domestic violence and trauma that he doesn’t know how to escape. His girlfriend Pumpkin, who runs the kitchen at Paradise, keeps saying she’s content with what she has. There’s the intimation that she escaped a much-worse situation. There’s also the hint that her insistence that everything is fine is a lie to herself that she doesn’t quite believe. Blue’s bandmates, Corn and P‑Sam, try to be supportive. They believe in Blue as a musician, but are starting to see the writing on the wall for the club, and thus, for their livelihood. Into this fragile situation steps Silver — sultry, ambitious, powerful, and clearly on the run for some crime she committed — who has aspirations to take over the club herself. All this plays out in the threat of the entire neighborhood’s looming demise, making the whole play feel like a ticking time bomb.

Paradise Blue, in short, deals with heavy material, a lot for any group of actors to take on. Scurry admitted to feeling a little nervous going into auditions, but his ​“amazing” cast ​“fit into their roles perfectly.” They were ready to follow Scurry in his desires to do plays that most high schools don’t do. He wanted to do work that aligned with New Haven Academy’s focus on social justice work. ​“So a lot of the shows that I pick” involve issues of ​“social activism, understanding how you fit in with the society around you.” As a high-school student, he had seen Paradise Blue at Long Wharf Theatre in 2018, and it occurred to him that it would be perfect for New Haven Academy as it enters the running for the state-wide Halo Awards for high-school theater. (The production is almost entirely student run, from set design to crew to cast.)

Scurry worked with the actors to find the depths of their characters. Blue, for example, isn’t just mentally unstable; he also has a drinking problem. Pumpkin ​“doesn’t have a family besides Blue,” Scurry said. ​“The only family she has is the one she made in Black Bottom.” Scurry delighted in watching them ​“dive deep and discover what works and what doesn’t work.”

The students also did ​“a lot of research” to understand ​“the historical aspect of what was happening in the show” — the erasure of a neighborhood, which happened in cities all over the country in the 1950s and 1960s (including, of course, New Haven itself) and the fact that the action of the play takes place a mere 60 years after slavery was abolished. The students didn’t necessarily appreciate ​“how close” the characters, and by extension, they themselves, were to slavery. Scurry also took them to Dixwell Avenue, to the building that used to house the Monterey Club. ​“This is a historical landmark for New Haven,” he told his students. ​“This would have been New Haven’s Paradise Club.” He wanted to show the students that ​“your world isn’t as different as you think it is” from the world of the play. He relishes how the cast became ​“student actors,” people who immersed themselves in the reality of the play, and learned a lot about history in the process.

The work the actors put in shows in their performances. As Blue, Christopher Samuels deftly traces his character’s increasing instability as he feels his time running out. Michelle Cochran gives Silver a cutting directness that weaponizes her aggression; what she wants, she gets. Jeremiah McCullough gives P‑Sam an earnestness that shows why he has been easy to exploit, but also why he has lasted so long. Azaad Mamoon turns Cornelius into an amiable, smoked-out mess that thoroughly charms and delivers laughs. Pumpkin’s character takes the longest journey of any of them, and Mikaila ​“Sora” Mae Matta captures that development, from timidity to ferocity, from quietude to simmering rage.

New Haven Academy’s drama program is now expanding to a full season. Next up will be a holiday show called Heart, which Scurry wrote. In May, New Haven Academy will put on In the Heights — another show that captures an urban neighborhood in transition, and a community on the verge of rapid transformation. As Scurry’s approach to theater emphasizes, it has happened before, and will happen again — and maybe if you stop and look around, you can see when it’s happening here, too, right now.

Paradise Blue runs at New Haven Academy, 444 Orange St., from Oct. 19 to Oct. 21. Visit the drama program’s website for tickets and more information.