DAmour - Detroit: a play

Lisa DAmour is a playwright and interdisciplinary artist. She is one half of the Obie Awardwinning performance duo PearlDamour, whose work has been presented by the HERE arts center, P.S. 122, the Whitney Museum of Art, the Walker Art Center, and the Fuse-box Festival. Her plays have been commissioned and produced by theaters across the country, including the Womens Project, Playwrights Horizons, Clubbed Thumb, New Georges, Salvage Vanguard Theater, Childrens Theatre Company, the Kitchen, and Steppenwolf Theatre Company. Detroit was a finalist for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the 2011 Susan Smith Blackburn prize. In 2008, DAmour was awarded the Alpert Award in the Arts in theater. As a playwright, Lisa has received fellowships from the Jerome and McKnight Foundations through the Playwrights Center, an independent artist commission from the New York State Council on the Arts (for Stanley [2006] , created with her brother Todd dAmour), and an NEA/TCG Theatre Residency (to create Hide Town with Infernal Bridegroom Productions). With PearlDamour, she is a three-time recipient of project funding from the Rockefeller MAP Fund and a 2009 Creative Capital grantee. DAmour received her M.F.A. in playwriting from the University of Texas at Austin and her B.A. in English and Theater from Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi. She is a core member of the Playwrights Center and an alumna of New Dramatists. She lives with her husband, the composer Brendan Connelly, in Brooklyn and New Orleans.

The world premiere of Detroit was produced at the Steppen-wolf Theatre in Chicago (Austin Pendleton, director; Kevin Depinet, scenic design; Rachel Healy, costume design; Kevin Rigdon, lighting design; Josh Schmidt, sound design and original music; Polly Carl, dramaturg; Tommy Rapley, choreographer; Matt Hawkins, fight choreographer; Michelle Medvin, stage manager; Rose Marie Packer, assistant stage manager; Erica Daniels, casting director; Adam Goldstein, assistant director; Anthony Werner, assistant dramaturg; Gina Patterson, lighting assistant; Brendan Connelly, assistant to the sound designer; Joann White, charge scenic artist; Melissa Rutherford, assistant change artist; Emily Guthrie, properties overhire; Kelly Crook, stage management apprentice; Andrew Berg, John Ginter, Christopher Grubb, carpenters; Emily Altman, Zoe Shiffrin, painters). The first performance was on September 9, 2010.

Characters

BEN , raised in the United States, somewhere inland: Kansas City, maybe Denver; worked at one bank for five years and another bank for six years; recently laid off from his job

MARY , raised in the United States, somewhere inland: Kansas City, maybe Denver; met Ben after college at an after-work happy hour; works as a paralegal at a small to midsize law firm

KENNY , raised in several cities in California until he was twelve or thirteen and his parents finally split up and he moved to Omaha with his mom; now works as a warehouse manager; fresh out of major substance abuse rehab

SHARON , raised in Tucson, Arizona, until she was nine; then she and her mother moved to Columbus, Ohio, for two years and then to Indianapolis, where she went to high school; in her junior year her mother moved back to Arizona with her boyfriend, and Sharon lived with her best friend to finish school; now works at a phone bank, answering customer service calls; fresh out of major substance abuse rehab

FRANK , two generations older than the other characters; maybe in his late seventies, early eighties, but hes spry, the kind of man whos been fixing his roof and rewiring the electricity on his house and taking care of his impeccable lawn for many years; hes happy

Place

Not necessarily Detroit. However, we are in a first ring suburb outside of a midsize American city. These are the suburbs that comprise the first ring of houses outside the city proper. They were built in the late 1950s, smaller houses of outdated design. The kind of house many people today would consider a starter house, or a house you would want to purchase, live in, and keep your eye on the lot next door so you could buy that, knock both houses down, and build a double-lot house.

Time

Now.

Set Note

This play is set in the front yards and backyards of the characters houses. Detroit can also be set in just the backyards of the two housessee the addendum at the end of the script for the line changes necessary to make this work. In the initial production at Steppenwolf, the show was produced with two backyards, side by side, visible throughout the show.

Casting Note

When I wrote the play, I imagined Mary, Ben, Sharon, and Kenny to be around thirty-four years old. Ive since realized that there is some flexibility in terms of the ages of the characters. For example, the show can be cast with Mary and Ben a little older, in their forties, and Sharon and Kenny younger, in their late twenties or early thirties. Its also possible that Kenny is quite a bit older than Sharon. I just ask that directors consider how the age of the characters reverberates through the whole script: the focus of the story can shift quite a bit depending on how old they are.