Detroit

The neighbourhood may end up in flames but Lisa D’Amour’s award winning 2010 play is disappointingly half-baked.Detroit promises to be about the post-GFC collapse of suburban dreams and opportunities in America, as jobs fall away and cities like Detroit slip into bankruptcy.

Two refugees from rehab begin squatting next door to a recently retrenched bank officer and his employed but alcoholic wife. Conventional and quietly desperate, Ben and Mary welcome this hopeless but engaging young couple into their lives.  

Over backyard BBQs and benalities, some home truths and sad needs are revealed. As the hippie-wise provocateurs, both naive and manipulative, Claire Lovering and James O’Connell are especially strong. Ed Wightman and Lisa Chappell are also fine but have the challenge of communicating through a repression and class-consciousness perhaps not familiar to Australian audiences.

A small revolve spins us well through backyard settings from designer Tobhiyah Stone Feller with Benjamin Blackburn’s dusk-time lighting suggesting change is in the air. Ross McGregor’s production gives chatty life to our struggling foursome which climaxes in one of the most authentic scenes of boozy party madness I’ve ever seen.

It ends in tragedy although, glibly, D’Amour makes that an opportunity for human transformation, sliding into American sentimentality. Any critique of a world which delivers this sort of suburban displacement, loneliness and human miscommunication is left to Ronald Faulk. He appears late as an elderly American voice remembering (perhaps inaccurately) the good old days.

Martin Portus

Photographer: Gez Xavier Mansfield