Detroit Play Response

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Detroit Play review In November, I went to Toland Theater to see “Detroit” by Lisa D’Amour. The play took place in a suburb of a mid-sized American city. The lights came up on Mary and Ben's backyard patio: a sliding door led to a flagstone terrace furnished with a round table and an umbrella in the middle, a barbecue grill and ice chest on the side. The story involved the growing friendship between two neighboring couples. Middle-class Ben and Mary were under financial pressure because he lost his position as a loan officer in a bank. During the play, I explored the complex relationship between Ben (played by Dereck Sveen) and Mary (played by Casey Scheneider), a seemingly normal married couple, and their new neighbors Kenny (Seth Steidl) and Sharon (Olivia Dubiel), who met in drug rehab and now have dead-end jobs and inhabit an empty house. Ben was recently laid off from his job at a bank and now stays home all day, supposedly working on a website, while Mary had alcohol problems. Ben and Mary were a relatively stable married couple who were quickly losing hold of their middle-class status. Ben took good care of Mary by cooking food or getting a drink for her. They have a broken patio umbrella and sliding glass door in their house. I thought it might be symbolic of something that was falling apart in their lives. The other main casts were Sharon and Kenny. They just moved into the house next door, which belonged to Kenny’s aunt. Kenny worked as a warehouse manager and his younger girlfriend, Sharon, answered customer service calls at a phone bank. Sharon and Kenny soon became friend with their neighbors Ben and Mary. For a backyard cookout, at first, I found the conversation was a little bit awkward. Nobody knew what to talk about. Mary ran on about a painful wart she has on her foot. Sharon was more than a little weird, becoming weepy as she observed no one

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