Welcome to suburbia – the setting of “Detroit,” a Pulitzer Prize-nominated play by Lisa D’Amour.

In this anywhere setting, two very different married couples live next door to each other in an average neighborhood. And though they struggle to feel normal, they each feel the ground shake beneath them as financial struggles and the fear of economic ruin permeate their daily lives.

“Detroit” opens Thursday at TheatreWorks. D’Amour will be in town later in the month to give a free Prologue Lecture.

“The themes and characters are relevant: economic instability, identity and class,” says director Shana Gold. “They all are so potent and relevant at the moment. She has this poetic language and exciting, thrilling action in her plays. This one really has its finger on the button of something very of the moment.”

Neighbors Mary and Ben are clearly a few rungs higher on the economic ladder, though Ben has just lost his job as a loan officer at a bank. And Sharon and Kenny, who met in rehab, work at a call center and warehouse, respectively. Despite their differing socioeconomic backgrounds, the four gradually become friends, though an undercurrent of tension flows beneath the surface.

D’Amour wrote the play in 2009 and it premiered in 2010, during the middle of the country’s economic crisis. She worried that by the time it got to New York City, it would no longer be relevant.

“The play is now vibrating more on this sort of class rift than it had before,” she said in a 2012 interview with the news website Blouin News. “There is a sense that everything is falling apart and that is the tension behind the play, that things are collapsing.”

That collapse comes in the form of losing jobs and lifestyle and how people see themselves. D’Amour’s script asks how one defines himself when all the previous labels drop away.

“It’s a tragicomedy,” Gold says. “It’s incredibly funny, but deeply sad. The humor springs from the desperation of the situation rather than jokes.”

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By TheatreWorks, opens Thursday, Jan. 22, 7:30 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays, 4 p.m. Sundays, 2 p.m. Jan. 31 and Feb. 7, runs through Feb. 8, Dusty Loo Bon Vivant Theater, 3955 Regent Circle, University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, $35-$55, $15 ages 17 and younger, not recommended for ages 15 and younger, ages 4 and younger not admitted; 255-3232, theatreworkscs.org.

Something else: Prologue Lecture with playwright Lisa D’Amour, 2:30 p.m. Jan. 25, Dusty Loo Bon Vivant Theater, free.

JEN MULSON, THE GAZETTE, 636-0270, 
JEN.MULSON@GAZETTE.COM