From left: Louise Lambert, Craig Lauzon, Sergio Di Zio and Diana Bentley.Dahlia Katz
- Title: Detroit
- Written by: Lisa D’Amour
- Director: Jill Harper
- Actors: Diana Bentley, Sergio Di Zio, Craig Lauzon, Louise Lambert and Eric Peterson
- Company: Coal Mine Theatre
- City: Toronto, Ont.
- Year: Runs to Aug. 7, 2022
- COVID-19 measures: Masks and proof of vaccination required until further notice
In the years leading up to the election of Donald Trump, many American playwrights were trying to get audiences to pay attention to what was going on in their fracturing country by writing about the lives of the downwardly mobile.
Stephen Karam movingly took on the subject by focusing on Thanksgiving for one American family in decline in his 2014 play The Humans, while Lynn Nottage examined a whole factory town sinking into addiction and extremism (and explored the systemic reasons behind it) in her 2015 play Sweat.
Detroit, Lisa D’Amour’s 2010 Pulitzer-nominated play now on at the Coal Mine Theatre in Toronto, predates those two – but definitely feels related. It focuses on two thirtysomething couples: one clinging to the bottom rung of the middle class, the other struggling to get on the economic ladder at all.
The play takes place, as script puts it, in “not necessarily Detroit”; we could be in two adjacent backyards in any first-ring suburb of any second-tier city. I suppose you could say it is set in a Detroit state of mind.
Eric Peterson.Dahlia Katz
Mary (Diana Bentley) and Ben (Sergio Di Zio) are proud homeowners. She’s a paralegal and he’s just been laid off by the bank he used to work for – but is starting his own business as a financial advisor while on severance.
Sharon (Louise Lambert) and Kenny (Craig Lauzon), meanwhile, have just started renting the house next door from a relative – and are on shakier ground. They met in rehab, or so they say, and are trying to piece their lives back together.
At a welcome barbecue, Ben and Mary offer more than a cup of sugar to their new neighbours. Ben says he’ll give them a free session about tackling debt and building credit scores back up, while Mary awkwardly insists they take their coffee table to help furnish their house.
In truth, however, Mary and Ben aren’t quite as responsible or stable as they would like to appear – and have their own unacknowledged addictions and secrets. As the two couples become friendlier and friendlier, it starts to seem less like Mary and Ben will help lift their neighbours up and more likely that Sharon and Kenny might pull them down.
Lambert plays Sharon and Bentley plays Mary.Dahlia Katz
The female characters really drive the show. Mary struck me as a low-key American suburban relative of the inept social climber Hyacinth Bucket from the classic British comedy Keeping Up Appearances; from the way she describes a cheese as “Danish Havarti” or presents a bowl of caviar at a barbecue, you can tell how hard she’s trying (and there’s a hint of heartbreaking to Bentley’s performance).
Sharon, meanwhile, gets emotional very easily – and is an over-sharer even in a first encounter. But she vibrates with life in a way the buttoned-down couple next door doesn’t.
Though Lambert was thrown into this production as a very last-minute replacement for another actress who had to leave due to “reasons beyond her control”, she’s the stand-out of the show, giving a performance that is an compelling mix of attractive and threatening.
Her Sharon may initially seem more like a hipster than the “drug addict” and “white trash” she describes herself as – but that’s mostly due to Melanie McNeill’s slightly off costuming and a short chic hairdo the actress wouldn’t have had time to change. Once you get past appearances, she fully inhabits this character that feels like a contemporary, American version of one of the interlopers in Harold Pinter’s classic comedies of menace.
Lauzon plays Kenny and Di Zio plays Ben.Dahlia Katz
While I found much to admire in Detroit, I couldn’t quite figure out the tone of the play – at least, not in director Jill Harper’s up-close but somehow distanced production.
While the Coal Mine Theatre is little, it rarely feels like it is. In this case, however, Ken MacDonald’s set does seem cramped – and the acting does not always benefit from audience proximity in the staging, which puts the play sideways between two tiers of audience.
The decision to have the actors make actual food on stage, with functioning barbecues on each side of the stage, doesn’t make it feel any more real – but, instead, more stagey. From a few feet away, for instance, I could tell that the burgers Kenny described as overdone were in fact underdone.
I felt that way about the overall production some of the time, too, due to the strange staging. When the actors were in the backyard further away from me, it had moments that felt underdone; when they were in the backyard right in front of me, it could feel overdone.
Detroit’s not a bad production – it’s only that, usually, when the Coal Mine serves up a contemporary American play, it’s served exactly right.
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