When barbecues don’t make good neighbors
Detroit isn’t so much a city as a state of mind in Lisa D’Amour’s darkly comic, curiously compelling play of the same name that opened Thursday at the Aurora Theatre.
The action doesn’t take place in any city at all, but in adjacent small suburban backyards — in Anywhere, America — where a series of getting-acquainted barbecues yields funny, revelatory and ever more combustible results.
Nostalgia — for a bygone suburban dream, for an America with belief in its future — keeps running head-on into modern realities as Mary (Amy Resnick) and Ben (Jeff Garrett) get to know the couple who’ve just moved in next door.
Ben, laid off from his longtime job as a bank loan officer, is — he says — spending all his time working on the website for his projected online financial advice business.
Time has passed, but the lingering power of the titular metaphor for urban bankruptcy and disappearing jobs lingers, infusing the finely drawn, escalating interactions of director Josh Costello’s crafty regional premiere at the Aurora.
“Neighbors?” Sharon exclaims in wide-eyed wonder at having been invited to a welcoming barbecue next door.
“Detroit” is D’Amour working in a much more realistic vein than the gothic-fantasy trailer-park realm with which she bowled over audiences in her Bay Area debut, “Anna Bella Emma,” eight years ago in a Crowded Fire Theater production — as is “Airline Highway,” with which she recently made her Broadway debut.
[...] it’s marked by her same skill in mixing gritty realism with surreal comedy and fantasy elements.
Resnick opens and closes the show with Mary recounting strange, typically complicated dreams that contain resonances both poetic and practical.
The accustomed frustration of Resnick’s struggles with opening a sticky sliding door speaks volumes about aspirations slipping beyond her grasp, as does the way she falls into reveries of childhood Girl Scout camping trips.
The blend of skepticism and frayed hope in the watchfulness with which she listens to Ben’s online plans reveals a whole play’s worth of material — comic and deeply poignant — about the loneliness of their marriage.