ANDY DRACHENBERG – Let’s start with the obvious questions. What is Detroit in one simple sentence?
LISA D’AMOUR – I think Detroit is about people who want to change their lives and how we all have a desire to change, told by two very different couples. It’s not necessarily about the city of Detroit.
AD– Tell me a little bit about where this story takes place.
LD – In the play, all the characters are living in this (fictional) sub-division called the ‘Bright Houses’ that was built in the late 1960s with all the streets still named after different kinds of light (both brightness and weightlessness). At the time it was built, the developers were trying to create a sort of Utopia where people could live in a great neighborhood with this central community center for everybody to meet. It was a dream to live there. Now, forty years later, the sign that says ‘Bright Houses’ has been knocked over so nobody knows it was ever called that. It’s ironic now because many people want to get out of the neighborhood and are no longer satisfied with the houses that are there anymore.
AD – These characters and their actions represent much more than one character… where do you see these people in reality?
LD – I think a lot about the neighborhood I lived in for two years in Maryland just before we moved back to New Orleans in the late ‘70’s. We lived on the cul-de-sac made up of the five model homes people chose from when the subdivision was built, so every house in the subdivision looked like one of the five. My mind floats back there from time to time…that was thirty years ago….what is that neighborhood like now?
When I was just starting out as a writer, after grad school, I lived in Minneapolis and did a lot of legal temp work to support myself. I worked in the city, but I also did a lot of work in the suburbs where I became friends with quite a few legal secretaries. In general, these were really creative women with absolutely no outlet for their creativity, and the idea of change was often terrifying for them. They couldn’t imagine any other life for themselves. It can be scary to try and think about how you might be happier when you don’t have a lot of money to change your life, and perhaps not a lot of realistic models for what happiness is. I sensed a real restlessness in those women, similar to the restlessness I see in the characters of Mary and Ben. It’s not that just that Mary and Ben are broke, its that their current life they are living is not how they want to be spending their time.
AD – There are plenty of in-depth themes in Detroit. Let’s start with relationships between strangers (and neighbors). How do you see these relationships in the real world today and in the play?
LD – In the play, the character of Sharon is very interested in communing with her neighbors. She’s just out of a rehab facility and is looking for community. The neighborhood she has moved into, however, seems to be comprised of people who come home from work and stay in their houses. Middle class families are so busy in America today, and perhaps programmed to work hard and then come home and be inside with their family, or maybe inside playing with whatever new gadgets they’ve been able to buy. Relaxing never seems to involve, say, having people over to your house anymore. In Detroit, the two sets of characters are each in a unique set of circumstances in their life, and they reach out to each other. This isn’t the norm. I saw this happen in New Orleans after hurricane Katrina – what a bonding experience having your city underwater is! The rehab efforts on the city, state, and national level was in such chaos, and was so inefficient (especially early on) that people started reaching out to each other and taking matters in to their own hands.
AD– What do you think it was since The Brady Bunch era that started this?
LD – I like to blame it on air conditioning. When it was invented, people no longer needed to go outside…they stopped sitting on their porches. And then there’s credit cards. If you can’t pay for something immediately, you put it on a credit card and forget about it. There’s a famous story in my family, when I was a baby, about my mom bursting into tears at the grocery store when I was little because my dad asked her to buy pickles and it wasn’t in the budget. She was standing there crying because she didn’t have the money in her hand to pay for pickles and milk. That doesn’t happen so much anymore in the world of middle class life. Of course poverty exists, but in terms of the class that I’m writing about, you just max out your credit card rather than burst into tears or ask your neighbor for help.
And then there’s the proverbial cup of sugar – I think it’s mentioned once or twice in my play – going over to borrow a cup of sugar. We still use that as a metaphor for neighborliness but – really? First of all half the neighbors probably use Sweet’n’Low! And if you really think about it, having extra sugar usually means somebody is baking. How many people really bake from scratch anymore? Still, I believe (or maybe want to believe) that people still crave this neighborly impulse…it is just trickier because the practical NEED for those neighbors is not as tangible anymore. Things like sharing, bartering and borrowing aren’t being marketed to us – why share when you can have your own?
AD – The play also explores the effects of addiction. Tell me about these in Detroit.
LD – The characters of Sharon and Kenny have been through a lot in their lives. They’re worn down because they’ve been struggling with addiction for so long, and have ostracized their friends and family over the years of trying and failing to recover. Now, they’re a bit like outcasts. Sharon and Kenny want to be back IN their lives, accepted as useful members of society. They want to live in the world rather than escape from it. I don’t know what drove them to become addicts, but I was interested in their efforts to recover and heal.
AD – What about the characters’ ‘do-it-yourself’ mindset?
LD – I think it comes out of necessity. Some people find it difficult to find the “hope” in Detroit, but I think it’s everywhere. Out of dire circumstances you learn to be resourceful. Ben is trying to figure out how to employ himself if nobody else will employ him. Kenny has no money and wants a nice back yard, so he has to make it himself. The ‘do-it-yourself’ characteristic of the play comes out of the specifics of where these characters are. We are told over and over again ‘you can have this instantly!’ in all sorts of ways. I think there’s something really potent about these characters having to do these things themselves.
AD– Detroit contains the subtle sense of fighting for survival.
LD – I think survival in this case is on an emotional level. The play presents a social situation, but it isn’t about trying to get money out of one another. There’s a sense of loneliness and isolation for these characters, and in order to survive, they are searching for new relationships. Both couples are testing out new ways of living in the world, exposing themselves to these vulnerable situations willingly.
AD– A lot of pieces in this story relate to the idea of moving up and down ladders…
LD – I think it’s less about your life falling apart or finding great success and more about taking that risk. Near the beginning of the play, on a very minor level it’s actually a risk for Ben and Mary to have Sharon and Kenny over for dinner. That’s the first instance where we see people stepping out of their comfort zone. It’s exhilarating and terrifying to take a risk, and I actually think that regardless of what it leads to, the character(s) ends up in a really interesting new place.
In the play, a lot of these risks happen at a small, seemingly innocuous level. These characters often say yes before they think about it, find themselves in a new place, and are forced to readjust.
AD– The piece was just performed in November at the Steppenwolf Theatre Company. What is the most exciting part of knowing your work is going to be on Broadway in a few months?
LD – I’m super excited to have the opportunity to deepen a production that was already really strong. It’s an amazing opportunity as an artist to do a project for a few months, take a break, and then enter back to in it. I’m also really curious to see what this new audience will be. The Broadway audience is really charged with energy and is incredibly diverse in some ways – you have people who see every show as well as people who save up to see that one show. I’m excited to see how that meets Detroit.
LISA D’AMOUR(Playwright). Lisa D’Amour is a playwright and interdisciplinary artist whose works have been presented in New York and other major U.S. cities. D’Amour has been commissioned to write two new plays for Steppenwolf over the next two years through support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.