Lisa D’Amour’s “Detroit” is actually set, as the program indicates, in “A ‘first-ring’ suburb of a mid-size American city.” But the Motor City in this dark comedy at Playwrights Horizons is a metaphor for the rot that afflicts the homes of her characters and the economic instability of their respective lives. Mary, a paralegal, and husband Ben, a recently down-sized financial officer, are desperately trying to hold onto their bourgeois existence when it's upended by their new neighbors, recovering drug addicts Kenny and Sharon.  He works in a warehouse, she in customer service. But the surface rituals of “being neighborly” — backyard barbecues, exchanged confidences — are exposed, often hilariously, as the two worlds collide.

D’Amour herself has occupied many different worlds. “Detroit,” a Pulitzer finalist, is more conventionally constructed than much of her previous work. She is best known as a performer and co-writer of  the Obie-Award-winning PearlDamour, the interdisciplinary performance company, which she formed with Katie Pearl. They’ve presented their improvisatory, epic-length pieces in Minneapolis, Austin, and New York City.

Born in Minnesota, the daughter of academics, D’Amour spent a great deal of time with family in New Orleans and their protracted recovery from Hurricane Katrina informed the writing of “Detroit” — as did the troubling addiction of one of her uncles.  Her love of ritual also came from that side of the family, to the point that, to please a grandfather, she once headlined as a Mardi Gras carnival queen for one of the smaller krewes. (“An amazing, if out of character, thing to do.”) D’Amour spoke with ARTINFO about how Katrina, Detroit renewal and the current economic crisis might well lead to a painful catharsis of sorts for the nation.  

Have you been to Detroit?

Yes. I got to see a little bit about what people assume about Detroit: burned-out neighborhoods.  But it’s not at all just burned out neighborhoods.  There’s also a radical energy around Detroit now: artists, activists, urban planners, and gardeners trying to re-imagine what this city could be. Without a lot of help from the city government because they have no money. It was amazing to see all that radical energy, which I feel is possibly proposed at the end of the play, which is what new things can we imagine other than these structures which are not working.

How does it feel to be opening this play in the midst of a bitter election about economic issues? 

It’s just such a mind fuck. Because I wrote this in 2009 when we were dealing with the economy crash, and it took so long to get to New York that I thought, “Omigod, it’s not going to seem relevant.”  But the play has been totally re-framed by an election that is much about the middle class and opportunity.  What was that line at the Democratic Convention? “When you go through the door of opportunity, you don’t shut it behind you.”  The play is now vibrating more on this sort of class rift than it had before.  There is a sense that everything is falling apart and that is the tension behind the play, that things are collapsing.

Without giving anything away, who would Mary and Ben vote for?

Well, I can tell you that an uncle got laid off by a big oil company just six months before he would be eligible for retirement. He’d worked there forever. After that happened and after this whole age discrimination thing, my aunt became a fierce Democrat after years of being a loyal Republican.  That’s how an economic situation can change your politics. Oddly, my uncle stayed a Republican.

How did you manage to balance what at first seems like a suburban comedy mixed with this undercurrent of dread?

I don’t have an easy answer to that because I wrote the play very fast.  But I often describe the feeling of the play as though these four characters are going about their lives at a normal backyard barbecue. And I imagine that their world is a diorama.  And perched on the edge are these giant birds of prey hovering over them and the characters know they are there.  And if they make one wrong move, they’re going to get snapped up.  I love that feeling, the sense of people acting like everything is fine. “This is just great!”  And at any moment their entire world is going to collapse.  At any moment these big birds could  pluck them out.

Is that economic anxiety or just the human condition?

I don’t know. I lean towards the human condition, but it’s easier to ignore the birds when the economy isn’t in the tank.

Ritual seems to play a great part in the play, whether it’s the barbecue itself or the manic dance —

Yeah. (Laughs) Absolutely that dance starts off as a crazy party and ends as a healing ritual. I was raised Catholic and grew up in New Orleans going to Mardi Gras parades, and there were rituals on every corner on every weekend. So I’m hyperaware of the role ritual plays in bonding people together, transforming a person.

Do you think ritual is what’s missing from our contemporary society?

I think the easy answer would be that we need more one-on-one, person-to-person ritual, that we spend too much time on the internet.  But I don’t necessarily feel that way because most of the internet interfaces — Facebook, on-line dating, meet-up groups — are designed to get people together in the same place at the same time. But what I do think is that we’re in an age where things are marketed to us so we hang out with the people we’re supposed to hang out with or expected to hang out with, racially or economically. In every city I’ve ever lived and worked in, I’ve seen the poor people pushed farther and father out and the rich people occupying the center.  And I do feel, in my sort of naïve craving, that we’re at a moment in our country when we just need to learn to hang out and relate to people who are really different from us in order to grow.

Don’t you think people have to be forced into those circumstances like the characters in the play?

Well, there’s no huge need to reach out. You reach out for what you need to survive and you forget that you might want to reach out for other reasons. For personal growth, learning something new. That’s not an immediate need so it’s hard to convince yourself  of it.

So does that mean the economic downturn is forcing people into circumstances that actually might be positive or hopeful? 

Yes! It’s all scary and it’s weird. As freelancer for the last twenty years, my finances have always been on the brink of economic collapse, so I don’t experience this in quite the same way. But I just feel that in times of economic distress or times of great loss, people are forced to really reach out to figure out who they are and who they want to be. It seems counter-intuitive, but people tend to take more chances in times like these because they don’t have much to lose.

Like what’s going on in Detroit?

Yes. There’s all this potential to imagine, and you have to imagine something new because you can’t depend on the structures that have come before because you know they’ve not been working.

And the vultures are going to get us anyway?

Yeah. So we might as well imagine while we can. 

"Detroit" is playing at Playwrights Horizons through October 7.