Lisa D’Amour’s ‘Detroit’ by PTC

Detroit — the city, not the play — was once a thriving metropolis with a clear sense of communal purpose: making cars. Its automotive products expanded Americans’ sense of freedom and mobility so profoundly that today one in every five Americans pulls up roots and moves every year.

Eventually, other communities beyond Detroit — in Japan and Germany, for example — began producing more efficient cars. Instead of responding to that challenge or seeking new challenges, Detroit’s movers and shakers decamped for the atomized suburbs, leaving an equally atomized shell of a city in their wake.

Detroit — the play, not the city — provides an intriguing, amusing, and ultimately disturbing allegory for this process. D’Amour’s generic Levittown-style suburban development, with its standardized ranch houses and patios, was once marketed as the American Dream. Today, as D’Amour portrays it, dreams remain central to the residents' lives, presumably as a refuge from their own dismal reality.

Ben, a bank officer recently laid off (played in the Philadelphia Theatre Company production by Steven Rishard), and his frumpy wife, Mary (Geneviève Perrier), cherish ambitious plans (he yearns to start his own consulting business, while she seeks a return to nature). “Our old life is going to feel like our new life,” Mary insists, “and our new life is going to feel like a dream.” Ben, citing one of his self-help manuals, intones, “If you follow your passion, you’re halfway there.” But passion is the missing ingredient in Ben and Mary’s household, and consequently that halfway point seems forever beyond their reach. Delayed gratification for the sake of an imagined future is their modus operandi.

Then the vacant and neglected house next door is occupied by their temperamental opposites: Kenny (Matteo J. Scammell) and Sharon (K.O. DelMarcelle) are latter-day flower children living almost entirely for the moment; they’re so focused on instant gratification that they’ve neglected to furnish their house, which remains virtually empty months after they’ve moved in.

Yet these two contradictory couples share a few critical characteristics: Both lack lives or plans, and both hunger for change. (“You keep thinking things are going to happen,” Sharon laments, “but nothing ever does.”) Both also remain preoccupied with their own self-absorbed fantasies even as they yearn for a sense of community that they seem incapable of creating — that is, they lack a sense of purpose larger than themselves.

We’ve seen this place before, of course. Anthony Lawton’s 2007 adaptation of C.S. Lewis’s Great Divorce, for the Lantern Theatre, imagined a town whose center seems unreachable no matter how long you walk toward it because the town’s residents are constantly expanding its boundaries by moving to its outer limits in order to avoid one another — a town where everyone gets what they want (except a community) and everyone wonders why they’re unhappy.

PTC’s antithesis

The virtue of D’Amour’s script for Detroit lies in its creation of genuinely original characters and its application of satiric wit to what could be a very depressing subject. (Ben’s description of one of his more ludicrous fantasies — his dream of reinventing himself as a British schoolmaster named Ian — in particular had me in stitches.) In the Philadelphia Theatre Company’s production, Maria Mileaf’s direction of a capable ensemble cast compelled my interest and attention throughout — no small feat for characters I’d rather not have as my neighbors. (Say this much for Ben and Mary and Kenny and Sharon, though: They don’t spend even one minute watching or discussing TV.)

Wednesday night’s opening of Detroit launched the Philadelphia Theatre Company’s 40th season, and the notables on hand included former mayor and governor Ed Rendell (who provided the impetus for the Avenue of the Arts in the 1990s) and developer Carl Dranoff (whose Symphony House condo development houses the Suzanne Roberts Theatre, which brought the PTC to Broad Street in 2007). In many respects, the PTC represents the antithesis of the characters in Detroit. It’s a community of individuals who have grown and flourished artistically by joining together in pursuit of a common mission: to provide a high-level incubator for new stage works. Whether the PTC survives for another 40 years or even one year — a question of great concern right now — its supporters have demonstrated the rich rewards (psychological if not financial) that accrue to anyone willing to work for a cause greater than oneself. In Detroit, they have inadvertently found the ideal vehicle to open this landmark season.

For a review of Detroit by Samantha Maldonado, click here.