Snapshots of Detroit: The Millions Interviews Dominique Morisseau

The final piece of playwright Dominique Morisseau’s Detroit Trilogy, Paradise Blue, is now ending its extended run at Signature Theatre in New York. The trilogy’s earlier pieces, Detroit ’67 and Skeleton Crew, dealt respectively with the city’s bloody summer of 1967 and, four decades later, with the death rattles of the once-mighty auto industry and the Motor City itself.

unfolds in late 1949 at a nightclub called Paradise, located in the heart of Detroit’s thriving black entertainment district known as Paradise Valley. There’s a cloud hanging over the club and its denizens. The owner, a jazz trumpeter named Blue (), is haunted by the ghost of his murderous father, and by something far more palpable. Race-baiting Albert Cobo has just been elected mayor on a promise to rid the city of “blight,” a code word