‘Detroit’ on Broadway

Interesting plot, I'm sure it is over-the-top in its sensationalism:

It’s high time indeed for a major new play about the soul-destroying layoffs, the collapse in real estate values and the general economic malaise that has gripped much of this land, up-ended our social hierarchies and, for many, turned the middle-class suburban dream into a greasy fireman’s pole with snapping turtles at its base.

Lisa D’Amour’s “Detroit” — the aptness of the setting is obvious from the one-word title — is such a play. Steppenwolf, long the one theater in America that has paid attention to the lives of the Midwestern middle class, is on point in offering a world premiere that certainly won’t increase your sense of personal comfort.

Sure, D’Amour ultimately does not delve as deep as one might wish into the implications of the situation she so richly and vividly realizes. And Austin Pendleton’s quirky and amusing production doesn’t always keep its balance; it has some dazzling scenes, but it also sometimes gets too caught up in its own playful and esoteric eccentricities to fully drive home the bone-shaking realities of life in a dying, or maybe just changing, metropolis. It needs a tonal shift, one stage darker, one stage truer.

But D’Amour has penned a very provocative snapshot of the perilous moment, as it plays out in two vividly realized backyards in a so-called “first ring” Detroit suburb. And that sense of dislocation is exquisitely embodied in the work of Laurie Metcalf, an actress who long has understood the precarious dreams of the lower-middle class. Her blistering performance here has the incision of a laser, creating a character who knows that everything is going away and tries to figure out what that might mean.

At a time of mayoral change in Chicago, there’s a cautionary tale here for suburbanites who over-emphasize their apparent independence. As Steppenwolf and D’Amour make all too clear using the terrifying urban case-study to our east, any decay in the urban core spreads like ripples in a suburban pond.

Of course, as the residents of once-elitist suburbs like Grosse Point, Mich., know all too well, the decline in housing prices has brought opportunity for some. People who could never have afforded to live there but a decade ago can now move in. So it goes in “Detroit.” Metcalf and Ian Barford play Ben and Mary, a struggling middle class couple who are trying to adjust to Ben, played empathetically by Barford, having been laid off from his job at a bank. His severance has just about run out, and, well, that bid to start his own financial planning Web site isn’t going so well.

“I’m using this as an opportunity to start a new business,” Ben says, with Barford catching the unease.

“He’s home all day,” complains Metcalf’s Mary, fear filling her eyes.

This being the Detroit area, the house next door has been sitting empty. Enter Kenny and Sharon [[Kevin Anderson and Kate Arrington), two recovering addicts.

They have no furniture and live their lives on a knife-edge. In theater, their ilk has long been presented as the opposite of suburban conformity. But this play is smart and fresh enough to see that those rules have changed now in some places like Michigan — mostly because of defalted home prices.

Ben and Mary try to make suburban nice with their new neighbors. It feels strange partly because Kenny and Sharon don’t know how to play that game very well [[they’re the kind who do what their bodies tell them), but also because Ben and Mary are themselves losing their grip on “suburban nice.” So should Mary change her social patterns? Is Sharon a new friend? In essence, the bulk of this 100-minute play consists of these couples trying to negotiate this new territory and prevent everything from going up in flames. For all four of them.

If you’ve spend any time in metro Detroit, you won’t question the veracity of Kevin Depinet’s set, with its Michigan-style brick home sitting next to a more vulnerable wooden frame. It is a magnificent design with a hefty, quiet subtext. You’ll also feel that D’Amour, whose way of writing is refreshingly unpretentious, knows the folks whereof she speaks. Anderson [[who is playing his second recovering addict in two Chicago plays and feels more at home with this one) and the risk-loving Arrington have a great deal of very capable fun with these jumpy characters, twitching and playing all over the stage.

There are darker depths yet to plumb here. The humor is certainly requisite, but some of the little crises in the play — when people hurt themselves, say — are staged too frivolously to be believed. At other moments, Pendleton will get his actors riled up playing some kind of game, which is fine, but you want the fun to stop more abruptly when the chickens come home to roost. The knives need sharpening.

Still, this is a fine and spectacularly timely new play for the fall. With the help of Robert Breuler, who makes a late-in-the-show appearance as a an older neighbor, I think D’Amour ultimately is exploring what really is going now that these boundaries have collapsed and neighborhoods have changed. It is as if generations of elitism have suddenly been wiped out in a rash of foreclosures. So what will the Detroit suburbs now look like?

I love it when playwrights beat the politicians to the punch.