Productions & Events featuring Dominique Morisseau

“We all got sadness. But I like to turn mine into fire, baby. What you do with yours?”

A dynamic and jazz-infused drama about what’s at stake when building a better future. In Detroit’s Black Bottom neighborhood in 1949, a gifted trumpeter and troubled owner of the Paradise jazz nightclub is contemplating a buyout offer for the city’s urban renewal plan. As the inhabitants of the famed but faltering jazz club ponder their options and dream of a better life, they must decide whether to fight to save what’s theirs or risk it all for a chance at redemption.

This latest from Dominique Morisseau’s widely acclaimed cycle of plays about Detroit once again proves why she’s one of America’s most urgent playwrights.

PLEASE NOTE: Peanuts will be consumed onstage during the show, and the production includes scenes of violence, multiple gunshots and strong language, as well as the use of e-cigarettes and haze.

The personal and the political collide in this powerful and timely drama—already a hit in New York and London—from one of the country’s most exciting playwrights (“[she] knows the code for getting under our skins” raves The New York Times). A tough, independent woman in Brooklyn is visited by her father, a former revolutionary in the Black liberation movement who seeks to mend their broken relationship. As father and daughter circle one another, old wounds are revealed, generational differences exposed, and blazing truths laid bare. Morisseau’s smart, entertaining and moving story about family, survival and the nature of liberation is “not only dynamic, it’s dynamite” (The New York Times).