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Playwrights Horizons, New York

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Note to Mitt Romney: Here’s your chance to see how the other half live, said Jesse Oxfeld in The New York Observer. For even if the characters in Lisa D’Amour’s “tense, terrific, funny new play” may not recognize it, they are “the 47 percent.” Their inner-ring suburb isn’t necessarily near Detroit; it could well be Passaic, N.J.; Cicero, Ill.; or any community that “swelled with the postwar exodus from the cities but subsequently stagnated.” Ben (David Schwimmer), a laid-off banker, and his wife, Mary (Amy Ryan), are “hanging on, but just barely.” Yet they’re far better off than their new neighbors, Sharon and Kenny (Sarah Sokolovic and Darren Pettie). Those two are recovering addicts and flat broke, and, as we soon learn, have a host of other issues.

In an initially friendly backyard get-together, even the patio furnishings “become emblems of surprising menace,” said Charles Isherwood in The New York Times. Sharon and Kenny know all too well “how susceptible everyone’s fate is to the workings of chance,” and their radically different perspective on life stirs up deep anxieties hidden beneath the carefully maintained order in Ben and Mary’s household. “I feel like the real opportunities are the ones that fall into your lap,” Sharon tells Mary, “like winning the lottery or someone’s rich uncle needing a personal assistant.” By night’s end, the party “spirals into a delirious, dangerous bacchanal.”

But as that happens, “events become zanier and less believable,” said Jennifer Farrar in the Associated Press. “D’Amour’s writing is filled with offbeat humor and imagery,” yet she goes too far, inflicting “a series of pointless, unfunny injuries” on her characters. Actually, credibility is one of this production’s greatest assets, said Elisabeth Vincentelli in the New York Post. You soon forget Ryan’s and Schwimmer’s sitcom work—“after only a few minutes, they’re just Mary and Ben from the block.” More importantly, D’Amour “totally nails the great, deep malaise of middle-class suburbia” post-2008. Even if the cataclysmic ending seems unlikely, it only underscores the point: “There goes the neighborhood, and America, too.”