‘Detroit” is deceptively small in scope. You could say it’s about neighborly relations.
But Lisa D’Amour’s dark comedy — which opened last night at Playwrights Horizons, after a successful Chicago run — totally nails the great, deep malaise of middle-class suburbia, with a sustained energy and a wicked eye for telling details.
Being laid off, hiding in online communities or in drugs and booze, failing to improve your station in life: It’s all here, and it’s funny as hell.
“Detroit” is so expertly written, directed and acted that you forget that two of its average citizens are played by Amy Ryan and David Schwimmer — after only a few minutes, they’re just Mary and Ben from the block.
And they’re really middle class, too, not the lawyers or doctors who are so often labeled that way. Mary’s a high-strung paralegal, and Ben just lost his job as a loan officer. Their house — set in “a ‘first ring’ suburb outside of a midsize American city” — is cozy but modest, with a sticky sliding door and rickety patio furniture.
At least they’re doing better than Sharon (Sarah Sokolovic) and Kenny (Darren Pettie), who’ve just moved next door. They’re a little rough around the edges — they met in rehab — but Mary and Ben do the neighborly thing and invite them over for a barbecue.
Mary, who has upwardly mobile aspirations, proudly serves her guests “caviar that came all the way from Norway.”
“Wow,” Sharon marvels. “Kenny won’t even let me buy Dijon mustard.”
As “Detroit” unfolds, we see how dreams easily become paralyzing delusions, and how these unhappy people lie to both themselves and others. You get the sense that everybody here is hanging by a thread, that they’re only a paycheck, a drink or a snort away from total collapse.
“We haven’t even dipped into our savings, and I don’t think we’ll have to,” Ben tells Kenny, but trying to reassure himself.
Director Anne Kauffman swiftly handles the tricky scene changes — Louisa Thompson’s detailed set features the front and back of two houses — and everything feels thought-through. While sound design is usually underused, here Matt Tierney lets us hear the sirens, birds and helicopters that make the American soundtrack.
And the actors — augmented by John Cullum, who pointlessly turns up at the very end — help us relate to those ordinary Joes.
Schwimmer, so smug on “Friends,” is terrific as an inhibited guy afraid to let loose, while Ryan lets Mary’s desperation peek through a brittle exterior. They’re well-matched with Pettie, a master of the expressive reaction, and Sokolovic, who swiftly navigates the addict’s accelerated manic-depressive cycles. One second she’s offering Cheetos at dinner — “the theme is white trash because I’m trying to own up to what I am these days, ha ha” — the next she’s cursing and screaming about a nosy neighbor.
“Detroit” builds up to a fiery one-two punch of a conclusion. There goes the neighborhood, it seems to say, and America, too.