The four are thrust into the room one by one, tumbling out of various doors and hatches. They’re confused and disoriented and they can’t seem to get out. Any exits are either shut tight or too high to reach. All are African-American; there are three men and one boy, and that’s not an incidental connection. And they are being watched.
This is “Kill Move Paradise,” the gripping new play by James Ijames that Berkeley’s Shotgun Players is presenting at the Ashby stage in association with the Lorraine Hansberry Theatre. It’s a potent follow-up to Ijames’ fascinatingly thorny satire “White” that Shotgun produced a year ago. The play is explicitly a response to the ever-growing list of unarmed black men and women killed in this country while simply living their lives, whether it’s at the hands of police or self-styled vigilantes who claim to feel threatened by their presence.
As they slowly remember what happened to them, the details are both vague and hauntingly familiar. We know these stories, these horrific injustices. The child playing with a toy gun. The driver pulled over for failing to signal a lane change.
There’s little question that they’re dead and that this is some kind of afterlife. But what kind? What are they doing here, and what are they supposed to do? That’s the crux of the play, and it’s complicated by the fact that they know we’re watching them, and it creeps them out.
As haunting and tragic as it all is, and as maddening the societal sickness is that brought them here, the play is also at times startlingly funny as the characters bond, play games and scrutinize the voyeuristic crowd.
It’s all magnificently realized by director Darryl V. Jones, the Lorraine Hansberry’s acting artistic director. Celeste Martore’s scenic design is fantastic — an all-white set with curved corners almost like a ship, complete with porthole-like protrusions. An old-fashioned printer sits on a shelf with linked sheets of paper spilling out of it, forming a cross with the short shelf. Shadows cast a fire-escape pattern over it all, at least at first.
Courtney Flores’ costumes subtly suggest different eras without becoming period caricatures — slacks and suspenders, a bowtie, athletic gear. The characters could have died within hours or days of each other, or decades apart.
Edward Ewell’s good-humored Isa, the first arrival, has been in this room before, and it’s strongly implied that his death was a lynching. Lenard Jackson is low-key and amiably bewildered as second arrival Grif. Tre’Vonne Bell is hilariously laid back yet quick to anger or panic as the animated, flashily dressed Daz (short for Dazzle, he says). Fifteen-year-old Dwayne Clay is both heartbreakingly innocent and precociously insightful as Tiny, the boy whose very youth is especially upsetting to all the others when he arrives.
The show is a compelling depiction of the mythic resonance that always underscores the all-too-pervasive institutional racism to which these four and countless more have been sacrificed. Mysterious instructions appear on paper airplanes, and the printer disturbingly continues to add to the long list of names of the unjustly slain. Veined lightning-like projections accompany the arrivals in Theodore J.H. Hulsker’s video design, and Elton Bradman’s sound design adds booming thunder or angelic music.
There’s an alternately funny and sobering litany of all the contents of the next room as a sort of ludicrous catalog of iconography of African-American life. Occasionally characters attempt to appease the audience with a grotesquely cheery song-and-dance number to the tune of “The Old Gray Mare.”
In a way the audience gets off easy. We’re scrutinized from afar from time to time, but these four have been instructed not to make the onlookers uncomfortable, even though white Americans’ comfort with this same thing happening again and again and again is exactly what allows the killing to continue unabated.
It’s a stunningly powerful piece of theater that takes overwhelming injustice as the inspiration to make something oddly beautiful.
Contact Sam Hurwitt at shurwitt@gmail.com, and follow him at Twitter.com/shurwitt.
‘KILL MOVE PARADISE’
By James Ijames, presented by Shotgun Players
Through: Aug. 4
Where: Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby Ave., Berkeley
Running time: 70 minutes, no intermission
Tickets: $25-$42; 510-841-6500, shotgunplayers.org
