Theatre in Review: Detroit (Playwrights Horizons)Lisa D'Amour's play is called Detroit, but her gaze is focused on the endless suburbs that encircle most cities, which, with street after street of prefabricated houses arranged in neat little grids, until recently represented the American ideal. In her version, however, they provide a setting for all sorts of mayhem. From the minute the lights come up on a backyard barbeque, something is ever so slightly off. Mary and Ben are hosting their new neighbors, Kenny and Sharon, and, if you listen closely to their casual chatter ("I'm going to throw these puppies on the grill!") you'll hear small, but persistent, signals of distress. When Sharon remarks that she and Kenny have no furniture, Mary exits briefly and returns with an enormous carved-wood coffee table, which she offers as a gift. Sharon and Kenny are dumbfounded, but Mary says she hates the thing, anyway, and Ben adds, cheerily, "We have no friends." It's the first instance of an inappropriate stab at intimacy and it won't be the last. Mary and Ben are the sort of middle-class, middle-management strivers whose lives have been upended and undone by the recession, and, lacking close familial or friendly ties, are floating in a sea of anxiety. Mary works as a paralegal, a job she clearly hates; Ben, a banker, was downsized out of a job. Now he's planning a new career as a financial advisor, laboring intensively on a website to advertise his services. "He's home all day," says Mary, a comment followed by a pregnant pause and a look of sour disapproval that unleashes a huge laugh. Never mind: "He's got this great book, and it talks a lot about breathing deep and taking your time," she says, demonstrating D'Amour's faultless ear for contemporary self-help clichés. "And how important it is to spend a lot of time doing things you're passionate about," adds Ben. "If you follow your passions, you're halfway there." Well, maybe. On the other end of the spectrum, Sharon and Kenny have very 21st-century jobs -- he toils in a warehouse, she in a call center -- and an equally 21st-century backstory: They met in rehab, and, newly freed, are more or less squatting in the house once occupied by Kenny's aunt. "That's why we don't smoke crack or shoot meth or snort big fat lines of cocaine at four in the morning for the third day in a row," notes Kenny, who is kidding, sort of. Mary and Ben are a tad nonplussed, but the game of getting to know you goes swimmingly until the patio umbrella snaps shut, nearly braining Kenny in the process. At first, Detroit looks like an Americanized Alan Ayckbourn comedy -- marked by acidly noted class differences juxtaposed with physical gags. (The sight of Amy Ryan, as Mary, struggling with a recalcitrant sliding door, provides more than one tasty laugh.) But D'Amour's camera eye has a wider focus. Ben and Mary are hanging onto their comfortable existence by their fingernails; this helps to explain their fascination with Kenny and Sharon, who, having lost everything, rarely think beyond the next minute. Indeed, their very presence has a destabilizing effect; it's not long before Mary, half in the bag, is confessing her dissatisfaction to Sharon on the front lawn, and Ben is planning a boozy outing to a strip club with Kenny. (Sobriety is a sometime thing in Detroit.) This, of course, comes after Ben's leg ends up in a cast, the victim of a shoddily built backyard deck, one of a series of disasters that stand in for the crumbling American infrastructure. In Detroit, those pretty houses are deathtraps. This is the point where Detroit begins to falter, ever so slightly. Constructed as a series of mordantly realized encounters that chart Ben and Mary's slide into their personal plywood abyss, the script sometimes suffers under the weight of standing in for all of America in its sour morning after following the bursting of the housing bubble and the subsequent money drought. This is especially so in the climax, when both couples get together for an impromptu Saturday night spree that turns into a full-fledged freakout, ending in an orgy of destruction that seems more a playwright's whim than an organic development involving these four people. Still, D'Amour has plenty to say about the members of the middle classes for whom the American Dream hasn't gone bad so much as it has turned out to be a mirage, who hold onto their diminishing creature comforts in cheaply built homes that are rapidly falling apart, and who haven't the faintest idea of what would bring them real satisfaction. She's also clear that suburbs like the one on display are communities in name only, where loneliness and disconnection can drive people to desperate acts. Anne Kauffman's production is filled with visual and aural surprises and features a quartet of actors who deftly juggle the play's moments of humor and high anxiety. Ryan's Mary struggles amusingly to keep her control-freak nature under control, but she's also touching when, brimming with anger and fear, she vents her unhappiness in mortifyingly public circumstances. Darren Pettie gives Kenny a slightly off-putting swagger that keeps you guessing about his real intentions; his manner of invading others' personal spaces while making a point keeps the menace level high. David Schwimmer throws away his laugh lines with masterly skill as Ben; he also provides a brilliant bit of silent comedy when Ben lets an airheaded comment by Sharon about the advent of "a new Internet" undermine his hopes in his long-aborning website. The most impressive of the four is Sarah Sokolovic as Sharon, whose tearful sincerity can turn on a dime into a towering rage. (D'Amour has given her an aria about an encounter with an accusatory neighbor that is a near-perfect account of a neighborhood dispute spinning wildly out of control, ending in a screaming match.) If you're going to bring in a character at the eleventh hour to offer a requiem for a lost suburban paradise, John Cullum is the man for the job; he is on stage for only a few minutes, but he ends the play on a profoundly sorrowful note. The production also features an unusual, clever design. The turntable on Louisa Thompson's set spins to reveal a number of front- and backyard looks, including a shocking final tableau not to be revealed here. Matt Tierney's sound design presents a symphony of effects -- lawnmowers, sprinklers, buzzing flies, airplanes overhead -- that evoke the life of the neighborhood. Mark Barton's lighting and Kaye Voyce's costumes are equally accomplished. If Detroit occasionally tries a bit too hard to make its points, it nevertheless has plenty of points to make. For all its laughs, its vision of lives built of shoddy materials on sinking foundations is sadly, and thoroughly, of the moment.--David Barbour 
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