A comedic look at US suburban dystopia
THEATRE
DETROIT
The National, Cottesloe Theatre | Zoe Strimpel
***
WRITTEN by American playwright Lisa D’Amour for Chicago’s brilliant Steppenwolf Theatre Company, Detroit was a finalist for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and received gushing reviews in the US. Now at the National’s tiny Cottesloe Theatre, directed by Steppenwolf’s formidable Austin Pendleton but with an English cast, I worried that the actors’ accents would ruin the whole thing and that a play about American suburban dystopia would seem out of place on the South Bank. But Detroit is, by and large, a success. It shimmers with almost-but-not-quite-obvious meaning; it’s right-on and funny, and unexpectedly subtle.
The setting is the suburban back yard of Mary and Ben, owners of much discount patio furniture. There’s nothing obviously Detroit-like about the place – the title lingers more as a symbol of America’s fall from economic (and possibly other sorts) of grace than denoting a literal context.
The play opens with Mary, who seems highly controlling and on-edge, trying to get a sun umbrella up, and failing. She is busy hosting the new neighbours, a young couple, Kenny and Sharon, who are round for a barbecue. Portly and good-natured Ben comes out to help and puts burgers on. And so the action kicks off: Mary is a paralegal, Ben is unemployed – a recent casualty of the recession. Mary supports them while Ben is home all day, supposedly fixing up a website for a new business (but probably looking at porn). Kenny and Sharon are ex-addicts who met in rehab (or so they say).
As the intimacy between the couples develops, neighbourliness proves a rich vein, and throughout a sequence of late-night intimacies and more barbecues, the couples let their guards down, then their hair, then a few other things.
A sense of urgency informs their union: for Kenny and Sharon, keeping the roof over their heads and staying off the crack; for Mary, getting through another day without driving off the road into a ditch out of the sheer boredom and futility of life; for Ben, a new start. The characters become pleasantly complex via their inter-relations. And despite the apocalyptic ending, this is not a gloomy play; there is little ill-feeling.
In the end, Detroit is let down by its own comedy – it feels lightweight, held back from being the tragi-comedy it should be. Thankfully, itgoes light on meta-blame – the consumerist American way, bankers and so on are let alone. But it also leaves you wondering quite what it wanted to do, quite where its beef lies. The acting is exuberant and exciting, though, and makes it well worth a view.