Look to your left as you enter Hallie Q. Brown Community Center and you can see Interstate 94. When that highway project carved a canyon through St. Paul’s Rondo neighborhood in the late 1950s, it fractured a thriving, century-old community of Black families, businesses and churches.

Take a right inside the door and you’ll find Penumbra Theatre, one of America’s premier presenters of plays and musicals about the experiences of African-Americans. And, if you want an excellent example of what makes Penumbra such a special company, check out its current production of “Paradise Blue.”

It’s part of a trilogy of dramas by MacArthur “genius grant” recipient Dominique Morisseau that chronicle in close-up major changes that affected the African-American community of Morisseau’s native Detroit. Penumbra has previously presented the turbulent “Detroit ‘67,” while the Guthrie Theater offered “Skeleton Crew,” which takes place during a dramatic decline in the automotive industry.

“Paradise Blue” bears echoes of the experiences of Rondo residents. It’s 1949 and Detroit is undertaking an “urban-renewal” project with an eye to tearing down what the powers-that-be at City Hall believe to be slums. But the Black Bottom neighborhood is a center of the city’s music scene, and the Paradise Cafe is one of its oldest jazz clubs, one that trumpeter and bandleader Blue has inherited from his parents. He’s faced with the quandary of selling or staying.

Under the deft, detail-oriented direction of Penumbra’s founder, Lou Bellamy, “Paradise Blue” is reminiscent of the company’s landmark productions of August Wilson plays, dramas that dropped you into a specific time and place and took you deep inside their characters’ dreams, desires and desperation. Also like those productions, it offers opportunities for excellent acting and Bellamy’s first-rate cast populates the club with memorable characterizations.

There’s Pumpkin, who handles all the cooking, cleaning and innkeeping, while Corn and P-Sam are the pianist and drummer in the house band. Soon, a slinking femme fatale named Silver enters the scene, looking to rent out a room and perhaps purchase the venue, something that P-Sam is also discussing.

But the bidding war that ensues is less about money than emotional stakes. For P-Sam sees the Paradise Club as the linchpin of a community in danger of extinction, Silver as a business opportunity, Blue as a haunted house and the city as something to be erased.

For Pumpkin, this is home, one that she clings to despite Blue’s physical and emotional abuse. And Nubia Monks brilliantly brings this poetry-reciting wallflower into bloom, aided by assertiveness training from Angela Wildflower’s tough-as-nails Silver. While Mikell Sapp overplays Blue’s wild-eyed torment a bit too much, he’s leavened admirably by Lester Purry’s peacemaking pianist, Corn.

But this production’s breakout performance comes from Darrick Mosley as P-Sam. I’ve admired Mosley’s work in several local productions, but he’s electrifying in this drama’s second act, commanding the stage with a vitriolic message that makes clear the author’s key points about the connections between people and a place.

Praise is also due Maruti Evans’ two-story set and Wanda Walden’s eye-catching vintage costumes. And composer and sound designer Gregory Robinson ably sets the sultry mood and makes Sapp and Purry’s musical moments convincing and captivating.