Lorraine Hansberry Theatre in association with Shotgun Players presents Kill Move Paradise by James Ijames, Friday, July 5–Sunday through August 4, 2019. This award-winning play takes the Elysium of Greek antiquity and flips the script telling the story of Isa, Daz, Grif, and Tiny, four black men who find themselves stuck in a cosmic waiting room in the afterlife. Inspired by recent events and the ever-growing list of slain unarmed black men and women, this play depicts these men as symbols of life and hope. 

Gone but never forgotten, Kill Move Paradise illustrates the collective spiritual transformation at work among the characters. Playwright James Ijames says, “[they] embody all the ways in which we try to be human. They are jealous, they are kind, they are maternal and paternal, they are pushed physically to the edge of something and then fall. You can’t deny their humanity. And they are all black. So the audience has to see them as they are. Imagining the white version of them is not an option.”

According to Ben Brantley of the New York Times: “Kill Move Paradise radiates an urgent and hypnotic theatrical energy.”  He writes: "This haunting, grief-steeped work, inspired by the shooting of 12-year-old Tamir Rice by a Cleveland police officer, imagines an afterlife in which the spirits of young black men try to comprehend how and why they died. The answers do not come easily, if at all."