The complete text of Lisa D’Amour’s Detroit appeared in the February 2011 edition of American Theatre.
POLLY CARL: The first show of yours I saw was a large performance piece called Slabber, nothing at all like Detroit. This has been typical of your career: You do large, often site-specific performance pieces, then a play. How do you talk about this dual nature of your artistic life?
LISA D’AMOUR: I often talk about it as satisfying two different parts of my brain—the part that wants to be in a room making things with my hands with lots of people, and the part that wants to “hermit up” and write. I make my site-specific work with the genius Katie Pearl—together we are PearlDamour. We almost always collaborate from the ground up with artists of different disciplines. The process involves a lot of grappling and a huge number of unknowns. Of course writing plays involves unknowns too, but I only have to grapple with myself!
You wrote Detroit very quickly, and we decided to produce it at Steppenwolf based on reading a first draft. It kind of came out of you onto the page and ready for production—right?
Yes—bizarre, right? I did a rewrite, and then we spent the first week of rehearsals putting everything right back the way it was. I wrote Detroit after an awesome, very collaborative year that began with making a performance for Swoon’s seven handmade boats that traveled down the Hudson River, and ended with lots of development work on PearlDamour’s dance-theatre piece Terrible Things, which I directed. I think I was just ready to go to a quiet place and write something that was “just mine.”
From your perspective, how does this play aptly represent the United States of America right now?
Well, let’s say it touches on a panic I feel in a certain middle-class to upper-middle-class United States right now. There’s a feeling that the things we thought were solid—whether it be a house or a job or an economy—are actually more like Jell-O. This can result in hardship, but it can also result in a call-to-action to reinvent yourself, to figure out what you really want and need—who you really are—rather than being ruled by messages (media or otherwise) that have been thrown at you since you were born.
In one of the stage directions in Detroit you talk about the difference between being beer drunk and being bourbon drunk. I’ve always felt that understanding this was the key to understanding the play. Can you explain?
Oh, Polly, please! You’re the one that missed my wedding. You’re just going to have to come to a D’Amour family barbecue down in New Orleans and I’ll sort that out for you.
When Detroit opened at Steppenwolf in the fall, a lot of your family came up to see it—was it 20 people? Several of them said to me they loved Detroit because it was the first thing of yours they actually understood. As an artist, what’s your relationship to your audience? Do you strive to be understood?
I strive toward the unknown. Maybe because Mac Wellman told me I should, or maybe because Sherry Kramer told me that there is nothing that concentrates the mind so much as the realization that you’ve been wrong. People go to the theatre looking for a new frame of reference. The situation in Detroit is perhaps more recognizable than in my other pieces, but I do think the play pushes the characters (and the audience) to an untamed place where they can reevaluate their assumptions. My hope—perhaps a naive hope—is that the theatre I make invites people to shake off any unwanted thought patterns that may be ruling them, and move toward something new in themselves and in the world.
Talk a little more about your family. What impact have they had on your writing?
My family is a spontaneous, fun-loving, political, opinionated bunch. They’ve shaped my sense of humor and my belief that the world is always generative. Watching them emerge from Katrina stronger and happier than they were before changed my life. And a ton of bad shit has gone down since then; it always does in families, right? But there’s still this general feeling of freedom when you’re with them—freedom to be yourself, to speak your mind, to goof off, to be angry, whatever. They’re definitely “in” all my plays in some way, shape or form. And one of my bigger projects of the last five years was a solo show [Stanley (2006)] that I made with my brother Todd. He was amazing! Just yesterday Todd was in the recording studio in New Orleans with my husband singing on some tracks of a new mini-musical we’re all working on. The line between work and play (and play and performance) can get really blurry with us…
When we were getting ready to go into rehearsals for Detroit, you had just been in NYC doing a “downtown” show at P.S. 122. What was it like to go from P.S. 122 to Steppenwolf?
Both experiences were awesome. What would American theatre be without P.S. 122 or Steppenwolf? Steppenwolf is, of course, a bigger institution, so there were more hands in and on everything—from marketing to set building to stage management. I was constantly moved by the incredible amount of honest effort that was going into making my play happen at Steppenwolf—so many bodies and minds doing so many things! I feel the same commitment coming from the team at P.S. 122; it just feels more like an underground club with schemes being schemed in secret coffee shops and salty bars, and a small number of people pulling off a heroic amount of work. I’m lucky to have worked in both places.
We have commissioned you to write two plays for us. How important is it to have a long-term commitment to your play writing from an institution like Steppenwolf?
It’s still very new. Rehearsing Detroit with an all-ensemble cast and getting to know the theatre space and audience at Steppenwolf was a huge help. I feel like we are in a great place: I want to consider Steppenwolf’s aesthetic lineage and Steppenwolf wants to be pushed aesthetically by me. When I was first commissioned, I kept thinking it was such an unlikely pairing! But now it feels so right—like this was a dialogue that was meant to happen. In terms of writing for the ensemble, I feel pretty free in terms of what I throw at them. The readings I’ve done at Steppenwolf and the production of Detroit have shown that the actors can do just about anything, and they are always up for a challenge.
What’s next for you?
The next PearlDamour piece, How to Build a Forest, at the Kitchen in NYC in June, and then in New Orleans in fall 2011. We are assembling and disassembling a simulated forest over the course of an eight-hour work shift. Audiences can come and go, participate or not. New Orleans-based visual artist Shawn Hall is designing this incredible ecosystem that seems like an old-growth rainforest one moment and deep-sea forest the next. It’s complete for about 30 minutes, and then it goes away. It’s about how long it takes for something to be created and how quickly it can be ended—whether that be a natural ecosystem, an installation, or the landscape of an entire city. It’s a reminder that we humans are intimately connected to the natural world, even when we choose to live in cities.
Polly Carl is Steppenwolf Theatre Company’s director of artistic development and was the dramaturq for the theatre’s production of Detroit.
