Lisa D’Amour’s play, first staged in Chichago by Steppenwolf Theatre in 2010, isn’t necessarily set in Detroit. However, it takes place in the heart of the depression that so crippled the city.
And it makes damn sure that you know it. The first fifteen minutes, as it introduces us to middle-aged, middle-class Ben and Mary, are so loaded with see-through symbols of financial decay that I almost lost patience. First, their sunshade collapses. Then, their sliding doors jar. Everyone talks about doing things on the cheap and Mary winces as the pain of her plantar wart: “a really nasty, yes, wart, that grows upward into your foot, slowly so it takes you a while to notice it, and when you finally do it hurts hurts hurts…” Can you see what sort of play it is yet?
In case there’s a sliver of doubt, all this is a metaphor for – as JFK would have said – not having fixed the roof when the sun was shining. Ben (Stuart McQuarrie, channelling Peter Griffin) is a newly-unemployed former-banker. He’s building a website to start his own financial consultancy. His wife’s nerves are shot to pieces. They’re a couple on a downwards trajectory.
So when their new young neighbours, Kenny and Sharon, move in next door, D’Amour makes it quite obvious that we ought to expect a social status switcheroo. For starters, Kenny and Sharon look perfect by comparison. They don’t drink. They work in honest, low-end jobs; in a warehouse and call-centre respectively. They believe in substance over appearance; not for them ‘heirloom tomatoes’ and “special pink salt.”
This must be a play, you think, about the new generation uprooting everything the old-guard have stood for, right? After all, Kenny and Sharon’s house, inherited from a great aunt, is built of brick, to Ben and Mary’s wood. Within fifteen minutes you’re able to confidently predict a shift of riches. Someone’s going to huff and puff and blow a house down and presumably, Ben and Mary’s swish garden furniture will gradually migrate to Kenny and Sharon’s adjacent back yard.
(SPOILER ALERT. AVERT YOUR EYES. RUN FOR THE HILLS. etc etc)
To a certain extent you’d be right. What you don’t anticipate is that the furniture – not to mention Ben and Mary’s marriage – will have been smashed to pieces by the time it gets there. Nor that their house will have been torched to the ground with it, after the four friends celebrate their new-age rejection of all things staid and seize the day with a back yard party. Kenny and Sharon (who met in rehab, by the way) turn out to be modern-day versions of Max Frisch’s Fire Raisers.
Essentially, D’Amour is counselling against the absolute radicalism that handles a crisis with fresh start. She’s warning against throwing baby and bathwater out together and points back forebodingly to the sixties. However, while I admire the conception of this misdirection, she steers in screeching swerves that wreck the play’s suspension. You might be surprised by the narrative’s turns, but you’re unlikely to give a hoot either way.
The problem is that to prime us for her trap, D’Amour has to go so heavy on the symbolism that the play almost becomes a parody of a recession-and-class play. She never misses an opportunity to mirror one character with another – and the impression is of see-through semiotics. Director Austin Pendleton follows suit, dressing Sharon and Mary in similar florals to ensure legibility at all times. That the two women end up kissing is both gratuitous and blandly inevitable.
There’s very little for the cast to do beyond conform to various stage stereotypes. McQuarrie is perfectly genteel and docile, while Justine Mitchell makes Mary a full-beaming neurotic. Clare Dunne and Will Adamsdale are more interesting as the younger couple; starting out totally in touch and communicative before unleashing a whirling wildness.
Ultimately, for all that Detroit’s message makes sense, it feels like a playwright demonstrating rather than doing. Everything exists on its surface, but there’s nothing much to make you pay attention.
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