If you’re one of those people who likes a title to reveal its meaning quickly, then Lisa D’Amour’s “Detroit” may gnaw at you as you watch newish neighbors Ben and Mary, Sharon and Kenny become entwined in ways familiar and combustible.
The name carries the weight of the steel and chrome autos that made it the Motor City, the heft of blue-collar dreams that for a time made it a emblem of working-class possibility. It also hints at the 1967 riots and the city’s sputtering, sporadic recovery.
But D’Amour’s play — at the through June 19 — isn’t about a real place. It isn’t even set in Detroit.
Sense of place is more its turf. As it unfolds in one of those early suburbs that girdle a city, the play exposes (think ripped-off bandage) its married quartet’s wavering roles in a down-shifting America.
As the play opens, Ben and Mary, Sharon and Kenny are getting to know each other over a meal in Mary and Ben’s backyard.
Though struggling, Ben and Mary are more established, a generation older. Laid off from a bank, Ben (Josh Hartwell) decided to begin his own Internet financial- counseling concern. When we meet him, he’s been building the website for longer than Mary (Karen Slack) is happy about.
Sharon and Kenny met in a substance-abuse rehab facility and began a relationship long before the suggested wait time of a year.
Things will get friendly, even frisky, as these unlikely couples take to each other. Sharon (Amanda Berg Wilson) and Kenny (Brian Landis Folkins) are cultural ids about to upset the older couple’s routine, one that is more fragile than it appears.
Michael Duran’s set, with its side-by-side backyards, does a great deal to orient us. (It also goes through an astounding transformation late in this one-act work.)
Mary and Ben’s home appears well put together: shiny propane grill, a little stone firepit. Sure, there’s that nagging problem with the sliding glass doors and the umbrella on the outdoor table keeps collapsing, but otherwise ….
Sheets drape the windows at Kenny and Sharon’s. Their backyard deck is unfinished. Early on, Mary lugs a pleasant coffee table into the yard — a gift for the under-furnished neighbors. It’s less generous than it seems. Ben will have to buy her a new one, she very nearly shouts.
Mary comes across more caricature than character. As played by Slack, she provides the laughs, the tossed-off lines. But it’s a performance that can too easily reward an audience’s superiority to suburban angst and housing-tract neurosis.
Herein lies one of the challenges of “Detroit,” a finalist for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize. As smart as this production is, the characters don’t feel fully fleshed out.
And though I wanted them to be, they almost don’t need to be. They are representatives of an economic malaise, stand-ins for the will to pursue, if not happiness, oblivion.
When a backyard gathering turns bacchanalian, D’Amour’s play begins to tease the metaphorical power of its title. Thrill gives way to something other. This is the Detroit of smoldering frustrations, of dreams deferred, of giving in to the inchoate ache for a cleansing by fire.
Toward the play’s melancholy conclusion, actor John Ashton arrives as Frank, a character able to provide not just a backstory for Kenny, his nephew, but also the housing development. It’s a fine bit of reckoning and wistfulness.
“It is such a perfect memory,” he says, recalling the promise of the Bright Houses subdivision. “I wonder if it’s real.”
In “Detroit,” director Chip Walton and his ensemble get at D’Amour’s tenacious ideas about disappointments and desperation, connection and dislocation. They are themes the playwright addresses in recently nominated for four Tonys.
Lisa Kennedy: 303-954-1567, lkennedy@denverpost.com or twitter.com/bylisakennedy
DETROIT Written by Lisa D’Amour. Directed by Chip Walton. Featuring John Ashton, Amanda Berg Wilson, Brian Landis Folkins, Josh Hartwell, Karen Slack. Through June 19. Run time 1 hour, 40 minutes. At the Curious Theatre Company, 1080 Acoma St. Tickets $18-$44 via curioustheatre.org or 303.623.0524
