Detroit at Coal Mine Theatre
Photo by Dahlia Katz
English-speaking artists have explored few concepts more thoroughly than the American Dream, to the point that modern understandings of the Dream are informed more by it critics than its champions. The concept is now a complete abstraction, if it was ever rooted in reality at all.
Refreshingly, Lisa D’Amour’s Detroit seems aware that the Dream has received enough direct critiques. Trusting its audience to engage with a critical eye, it instead offers an indirect, meanderingly structured case study of two American couples: the bland but slightly more well-off Mary (Diana Bentley) and Ben (Sergio Di Zio); and the worse-off Sharon (Louise Lambert) and Kenny (Craig Lauzon), who, post-rehab, are trying to create a new life for themselves.
The two couples, next-door neighbors in a sunny suburb, do the things suburban neighbors are supposed to do: they have each other over for dinner, throw some “puppies on the grill”, and uncomfortably discuss mundanities. Mary and Ben know how these dinners are supposed to go, but they’re not very good at hosting them. Still, next to the clueless Sharon and Kenny, they look like experts.
This all works as a play because what these characters are saying is utterly unimportant. It’s how they say it, and the fact that they are saying it at all, that matters. It’s the uncomfortable physical presence of the couples together in the yard — the friction between their differently calibrated body languages — that creates the many layers of subtextual tension that Detroit needs to function.
And director Jill Harper’s Coal Mine production brings this physical world to fairly vivid life. The smell of real meat really cooked on stage fills the theatre during each of the three dinner parties, and there’s a big focus on small physical details: there’s a shoddily constructed backyard deck, a sliding door that keeps getting jammed, and a hard-to-put-up table umbrella. These details subtly gesture towards larger structural instabilities, and they are seamlessly incorporated into the production.
Ken MacDonald’s set tries to engage with both of the play’s two oppositely defined geographies: in the fore, it is hyper-realistic, building on the well-defined immediate world of the couples’ backyards; but in the back, it is more abstract, mirroring the play’s abstractly defined larger geography (we never find out where this suburb is). This makes a lot of sense on an conceptual level, but I’m not sure it totally jives with the way the theatre is set up for Detroit. It’s a stage far more wide than long, and it’s a thrust, so about half of the audience watches from the sides; and from this side view, the non-literal background is not as clearly separated from the literal foreground, which muddies the otherwise clear visual concept.
In fact, the thrust seating is here generally double-edged. On the one hand, it allows for greater intimacy, immersing the audience more fully in these couples’ backyards. But on the other, it makes the stage image much harder to control, sometimes leaving portions of the audience straining to access that physical world which Harper has so well defined. This difficulty is more present in Detroit’s more static first half, when the cast spends long periods of time in one of the two onstage backyards — once we start moving towards the play’s dynamic conclusion, there’s much more movement between the yards, and it’s easier for the performers to fill the space.
Still, Detroit is another solid Coal Mine production. Their mandate seems to be “great plays, done well”; in other cities, this could be seen as a boring approach, but in a city with so many theatres that only do new plays (that necessarily vary wildly in quality), Coal Mine offers a well-needed counterpoint.
Runs ‘til August 7, but Coal Mine’s loyal followers have all but sold it out.