[Woody’s [rating: 3]

Instead of “Detroit,” playwright Lisa D’Amour might have named her Pulitzer Prize finalist play “Metaphor, California.”

Or “Metaphor, New York.”

Or, for that matter, “Metaphor, Anywhere.”

The title surely doesn’t signify the real Motor City. It’s  — dare I say it? — just a metaphoric label for a play that’s a comedic depiction of the fiscal scars the Great Recession left on the suburban middle class American psyche.

D’Amour says she used Detroit because it had become “a symbol to so many people of the American dream drying up.”

That resonates with me.

Seeing a revival of the Obie winner at the Aurora Theatre in Berkeley could seem like witnessing a 100-minute intermission-less dream left too long on a backyard barbecue.

But with more levity than most comedies I’ve watched in several years.

I do have one caveat: None of it sounds funny in print.

And “Detroit” does rank high on my Squirmometer, a personal indicator of how uncomfortable dialogue or characters make me.

Ben (a wide-eyed, slack-jawed Jeff Garrett) has lost his bank loan officer’s job and appears to be toiling feverishly on a website that will launch a startup. Mary (an ultra-solemn, fuming Amy Resnick), his wife, drinks too heavily (to the point of upchucking on a new neighbor) and hobbles because of a painful planters wart on her foot and an even more agonizing burr on her being.

He bemoans accurately that they “don’t have any friends.”

To say their home and lives are broken is to state the obvious.

A big table umbrella unexpectedly shuts on folks beneath it. A sliding screen door won’t open or close properly. A patio chair falls apart.

Financial woes have pushed them way out of their comfort zone.

Still they want to be neighborly so they invite to dinner a pair of rootless recovering addicts who might never have had a comfort zone.

Kenny (Patrick Kelly Jones), who shamelessly admits they have only one towel too dirty to use, and Sharon Luisa Frasconi), who wants “to own up to what I am” — white trash, are a problematic mirror of the older couple’s unease.

As they unveil each other’s secrets, Kenny and Sharon flip the invitation, welcoming Ben and Mary to their digs despite having zero furniture and an equal amount of food (unless you count chips and Velveeta).

Though all four actors do bang-up jobs delineating their characters, Resnick and Garrett radiate, perhaps because their verbiage-laden roles are meatier.

Director Josh Costello effectively stages both antics and melodrama, sharply pulling into focus the question of how we cope with our insecurities when we can’t pay our bills.

The comedy-drama returned my memory to the first home I purchased, a suburban Philadelphia prototype in southern New Jersey created by William Levitt, a man renowned for developing instant all-white ticky-tacky communities out of whole cloth, identical blueprints and tiny plots.

I recalled, too, all the trappings that came with the tract houses.

Which included white picket fences, green lawns, good schools and clothes washed in 99 and 44/100ths percent pure Ivory soap.

But the play impacted my opening night companion more.

Although he viewed it as a flimsy farce and melodrama “rather than something to be considered seriously,” revolving around “unreal characters” he never grew to care about, he somehow let two BART trains pass him by while pondering the significance of “Detroit.”

A lingering, disturbing query: Have we all been living out the Rise and Fall of the American Empire?

Could be.

“Detroit” runs at the Aurora Theatre, 2081 Addison St., Berkeley, through July 26. Night performances, Tuesdays, 7 p.m.; Wednesdays through Saturdays, 8 p.m. Matinees, Sundays, 2 p.m. Tickets: $16-$50. Information: 1-510-843-4822 or www.auroratheatre.org.

Contact Woody Weingarten at voodee@sbcglobal.net or at www.vitalitypress.com

Can you imagine the front of the four-story U.S. Bank building in downtown San Anselmo as an oversized fish tank?

Dan Thomas can.

And he’s done something about it.

But it’s taken him 40 years to scratch his inner itch about the structure, to shrink his edifice complex.

His weaponry? Watercolors.

And whimsy.

It happened last month, when Dan, my longtime next-door neighbor in San Anselmo, painted “a series of fantasies conceptualizing how the bank branch might improve its look.”

Until then, the high-rise — by town standards, at least — merely aggravated Dan every time he passed it.

His problem?

“The building, which was constructed in 1962, didn’t fit the surrounding environment.”

Dan sits at my dining room table displaying his watercolor sketches. And jabbering like he’s stumbled onto a second childhood.

“Just before I drew the first parody, the fish tank,” he says, “I thought, ‘Let’s see if I can have some fun.’

“Then, for a second I thought maybe I and the bank could be playful. Maybe the bank would let me decorate it for a couple of months. But then I decided the bankers, a serious lot, would be unlikely to see the humor in it.

“All of this, of course, is strictly in my head — it’s all make-believe.  I haven’t approached U.S. Bank at all. I have no real plan to ask the bank to change anything.”

The sketches, Dan tells me with mischievous twinkles in both blue eyes, involve “humor, what-if’s and a play of colors.”

The bank’s window treatment, explains the retired architect, “is six-inch thick concrete, 16 feet wide, 32 feet high, two feet deep. The top and bottom segments form a complete circle. There are eight circles over all. I used to visualize that the only thing that would [help] would be to make window treatments with fish tanks with live fish. The idea stayed with me. So I finally sketched it, to scale, as if it were an architectural rendering.”

His initial plan was only to do that one concept, but he became so motivated he concocted a dozen fanciful sketches in only two weeks.

“My idea was to give the Town Council a humorous view of the building — as a cautionary tale — to remind them you can’t turn back once you’ve made a decision. Had the council gone ahead with its original General Plan, the town would have had 10-story buildings.”

I almost choke on the thought.

I like San Anselmo for what it is, a quaint, little town despite being a refuge for coffee buffs, boutique shoppers and upscale bicyclists.

Noticing my discomfort, Dan placates me — grinning.

“Again, remember this is make-believe, even though a real fish tank actually could be built with Plexiglas and a little bit of cork.”

Once he’d retired, Dan returned to an early love — painting. He worked mainly on landscapes, but now again dabbles in abstracts. He’s good enough to have won prizes, including firsts, at Marin and Napa county fairs — as well as Marin Society of Artists juried shows in Ross.

Now 79, he remembers once painting “full time, mostly allegorical paintings, working my way through my religious upbringing as a strict Pentecostal.”

That, of course, is miles from imagining fish in windows at the 46-feet, 6-inch high site, where for years I’ve banked in the tallest building in town.

One of Dan’s watercolors is tied to “the good economic times” we’re experiencing anew, featuring “drinks on the house — cocktail glasses filled to the brim.”

In another, a series of sunglasses symbolize “warm periods — sunny days.”

Soup cans also became a happy construct. Although the Andy Warhol tribute might allude to soup lines, the artist says he intended to evoke “a ‘Happy Days Are Here Again’ feeling.”

One striking piece is a light-hearted plea for egalitarianism. Faces become a commercial for both bank and tolerance.

“It means, ‘We serve all nationalities,’” Dan says.

Taken as a whole, the sketches comprise his “first attempt at humor in art — I’m a pretty serious character in a lot of ways — although these may have loosened me up a bit.

“I’m working on one right now where I’m putting a hand-painted silk tie right in the middle of an abstract painting that looks like a vest.”

I postulate he’s now in-vested in projecting a less-serious attitude.

Contact Woody Weingarten at voodee@sbcglobal.net or http://vitalitypress.com

[Woody’s [rating: 2.5]

I couldn’t help fantasizing at A.C.T.’s experimental “Love and Information.”

English playwright Caryl Churchill’s plot-less, 57-scene scattergun technique goaded me into it.

I had the distinct impression she’d dreamed — before writing this play — that Samuel Beckett, spouting weighty sentence fragments, was pitted against Harpo Marx’s deadpan and wide-eyed comedic facial exaggerations while Ingmar Bergman flashed myriad disparate images on a split-screen behind them.

“Love and Information,” playing at the refurbished Strand Theater, introduced me to some 140 mostly unnamed characters in 100 minutes.

Through a stellar 12-member cast that magically spun many of the vignettes into gold.

Enthralling.

Yet, finally, a touch frustrating.

As if someone had stolen more than a few pieces of a new jigsaw puzzle I was being asked to put together.

Because so many of the pieces were mere fragments (ranging from a few seconds to a few minutes), audience members got to plug the holes from our personal histories and baggage — though we had to think fast because the next scene always tested our minds instantly after the last, much like one Henny Youngman gagline following another without a breath.

My favorite moments included two men humorously and poignantly misremembering yesterday’s love affair, two teens freaked out because they didn’t know a personal detail about a crush on a guy they both had, two dudes discussing an apparent direct message from God, and a woman reflecting about life and death after being gifted with a red rose.

Not exactly light subjects.

But being inundated with technology was the main target of Churchill’s stylized shorthand, with lust and longing (as opposed to love) finishing a distant second.

By not writing stage directions or character descriptions into the text, and by suggesting vignettes could move from any of the seven segments to another, she gave directors and their whims plenty of latitude.

“Love and Information,” therefore, has varied radically from city to city.

Here, director Casey Stangl did astonishingly well — especially since I occasionally felt as though a carnival mirror had been shattered and I was left to reassemble endless shards.

Introducing the first show produced at the refurbished Strand, Carrie Perloff, the American Conservatory Theater’s longtime artistic director, cited Stangl’s having successfully built the production while the house was “being built around her.”

Perloff also referenced the old Strand, where she teasingly suggested theatergoers might have caught films like “The Rocky Horror Show” or “Deep Throat.”

“Love and Information,” which opened in London in 2012, felt a gadzillion miles from such classic movies — in both tone and concept.

It had no overall arc or linear storyline. Its scenes left the sensation of being almost randomized.

Perhaps because of those elements, the rebuilt 283-seat theater, which cost almost $35 million (and includes an even more intimate stage, The Rueff, which seats only 140), seemed like an ideal venue.

The huge onstage screen in effect became the set. Movable, unattached doors were basically the only addition (except for various tables and chairs used as props).

Before the show on opening night, actors mingled with the lobby crowd and performed shtick such as dancing wildly to plugged-in music, burying oneself almost catatonically in an iPhone, coughing and sneezing loudly and frequently. A huge LED screen flashed brief previews of what was to come inside — plus other glimpses of items relating to communication (such as binary numbers, Pig Latin and a tagger spraying graffiti with gaudy paint).

Inside, the screen at the rear of the stage — which later would feature eclectic images that incorporated photos of Market Street — showed a live feed of the audience itself.

Besides the quasi-trauma of seeing myself projected, I was subjected to a surreal moment:

Early in the play, a patron’s cell phone went off, adding a bouncy pop tune to the ambience. Had I not been sitting next to the guy, I undoubtedly would have thought it was yet another disconnected part of the play.

Unlike Churchill’s “Cloud Nine,” “Top Girls” or “Serious Money,” “Love and Information” might be a perfect fit for anyone with a short attention span.

And maybe — in today’s exhaustingly frenetic fast-everything world in which “USA Today” and “TMZ” head the most-read, most-watched lists — that could apply to all of us.

“Love and Information” plays at the American Conservatory Theater’s Strand Theater, 1127 Market St., San Francisco, through Aug. 9. Night performances, 7 p.m. Sundays, 7:30 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays, Matinees, 2 p.m. Wednesdays and Saturdays. Tickets: $40 to $100. Information: (415) 749-2228 or www.act-sf.org.

Contact Woody Weingarten at www.vitalitypress.com/ or voodee@sbcglobal.net

 

[Woody’s [rating: 5]

I can’t remember ever feeling as white as when I saw “Choir Boy,” the new Marin Theatre Company drama.

The play, which provides scaffolding for the notion of tolerance, is incredibly powerful.

And incredibly black.

Playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney immediately sets the tone with a black prep school commencement where the words “sissy” and “nigger” are hurled at a gay student.

I thought I’d been color-blind all my life.

I’d banded on civil rights issues in the early ‘60s with militant black attorney Paul Zuber and self-styled radical lawyer Paul Kunstler.

Earlier, I’d joined my father in welcoming into our home in a New York suburb what then were called Negroes. I’d enjoyed rhythmic, bluesy “race records” spun by “Moondog” (deejay Alan Freed) and spirituals by Mahalia Jackson and less famous African American artists. I’d been moved beyond belief by Billie Holiday wailing “Strange Fruit,” a musical lamentation for a lynching.

I thought I’d earned my liberal stripes.

In 100 “in-your-face” minutes, “Choir Boy” showed me I’ve been practically delusional.

Being Caucasian inevitably precludes a total understanding of the black condition.

“Choir Boy” is markedly pertinent today, when city after city in the United States face sharper racial divides than in decades.

During rehearsal of the show, director Kent Gash told his actors: “No play happens in a vacuum…As we have seen in recent events in Baltimore, African American male lives are at risk. It’s hard not to feel like an endangered species sometimes.”

But “Choir Boy” is more than more an eye-opener — it’s a masterpiece.

I’ve seen four previous plays by MacArthur “genius” grant winner McCraney — April’s “Head of Passes” at the Berkeley Rep, and each part of his “Brother/Sisters Plays” trilogy at the MTC, A.C.T. and Magic Theatre.

Each was extraordinary. Each was formidable.

This drama is better still.

Craney seems to be growing exponentially as a playwright as he matures (he’s only 34 now).

“Choir Boy,” a coming-of-age story but so much more, pits a gifted homosexual scholarship recipient, Pharus, against Bobby, a student with current and historic family ties to the Charles R. Drew Prep School for Boys.

That fictional school is based on real black history.

Before desegregation, about 100 such schools existed in the United States (only four remain today), which I hadn’t known.

Jelani Alladin instills vitality and reality in Pharus, a young man caught between a desire to be accepted and one of being himself, a theme that’s also reflected in other characters, particularly David, a conflicted, wannabe pastor played by Forest Van Dyke.

Pharus contrasts sharply with Bobby, hot-headedly portrayed by Dimitri Woods as a privileged rebel.

The play, which premiered in London in 2012, is not without periodic injections of humor. But it’s the anguish and poignancy that are unforgettable.

And mind-blowing.

Each of the seven “Choir Boy” cast members is superb, with each of the six black performers layering individualized vocal chops onto their thespian skills.

Ken Robinson, who plays Headmaster Marrow, a rule-oriented man steeped in tradition, has the richest, deepest voice.

None of the others are vocal slouches, though.

Spirituals — both familiar (such as “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child” and “Wade in the Water”) and not — are sprinkled throughout.

They definitely buoy the drama.

Were the originals uplifting and freeing, or did various slave songs include “coded messages”? A cerebral onstage debate may feel like a distraction from the plot yet is a meaningful connection to black history.

So’s the performance of the sole white in the all-male cast, Charles Shaw Robinson, who’s believable as Mr. Pendleton, a compassionate teacher who’d marched with Martin Luther King Jr. and participated in countless sit-ins.

You probably know somebody just like him.

Rotimi Agbabiaka, as Junior Davis, Bobby’s enabler and sidekick in delinquency, is responsible for most of the humor (though the Pharus character has his share).

And filling out the cast is Jaysen Wright as Anthony (“AJ”), a sensitive athlete-scholar.

The play, it should be noted, includes full-frontal nudity.

Alladin — in a post-play “talk-back” response to a question — explained it well: “The nudity is more than about being naked. It’s a moment when the audience is being asked, ‘Are you comfortable in your skin?’”

Most significantly, the play shows that African American men, like all others, are not one-dimensional, not stereotypes, but complex human beings.

It’s a lesson I’m unlikely to forget.

“Choir Boy” plays at the Marin Theatre Company, 397 Miller Ave., Mill Valley, through June 28. Night performances, 7 p.m. Sundays; 7:30 p.m. Wednesdays; 8 p.m. Tuesdays, Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays. Matinees, 1 p.m. Thursdays; 2 p.m., Saturdays and Sundays. Tickets: $10 to $55. Information: (415) 388-5208 or marintheatre.org.

Contact Woody Weingarten at www.vitalitypress.com/ or voodee@sbcglobal.net