Woolly once again reconfigures its performance space (thereby confusing its volunteer ushers) into a gallery configuration: two suburban tract houses (in a first-ring suburb of a mid-sized American city) face each other across their backyards. The design sets up an anticipated closing-scene effect that is less than spectacular, but it does provide a backdrop for some interesting film projections, accompanied by Christopher Baine’s sound, that cover the numerous scene transitions.
The misdirect in Lisa D’Amour’s Detroit is that it is less to do with any broken suburban dreams (despite the somewhat misguided lobby collateral) and more to do with self-destruction and self-deception—what your mother calls “lying to yourself.” Danny Gavigan and Gabriela Fernández-Coffey are quite good as Kenny and Sharon, both of them fresh out of rehab and scratching for respectability and financial stability. Gangling Kenny, who gives us some great cringes in response to neighbor Mary’s (Emily Townley’s) play-by-play on her plantar wart surgery, speaks a working class dialect of indeterminate origin that nevertheless reminds me of a certain colleague’s natural voice. The desperation for conventional normalcy in the voice of Fernández-Coffey’s Sharon is palpable.
Sharon and Kenny backslide, pulling Mary and husband Ben (Tim Getman) along with them, and narrative track falls off the table. In the coda, company member Michael Willis looks newly trim and distingué.
- Detroit, by Lisa D’Amour, directed by John Vreeke, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington