Lisa D'Amour

Prepare to redraw all your maps. Starting next May, Detroit will be found in London. Then, a few months later, it will be in New York City. That's the same Detroit, by the way, that was located in Chicago a year ago, the Detroit – italics now, please – penned by onetime Austin playwright Lisa D'Amour. This prodigiously gifted dramatist spent just a handful of years here in the late Nineties and early Aughts, but the works that she produced locally then – 16 Spells To Charm the Beast, Nita & Zita, Anna Bella Eema, Slabber, Dress Me Blue/Window Me Sky, Oscar Snowden and the Magic O – were so dynamic and distinctive, we're still inclined to claim her as one of our own.

D'Amour's star has risen in the theatrical firmament in the decade since. Case in point: Last month, she was one of two recipients of the 2011 Steinberg Playwright Award, which "honor[s] the accomplishments of some of the most gifted up-and-coming American playwrights" and comes with $50,000 in cash. Austin has had to share D'Amour with many other cities, not the least of them Chi-town, where her Detroit was staged to great acclaim by Steppenwolf Theatre Company. That drama, tracing the backyard clash between a middle-class couple and their recovering addict neighbors, earned so much acclaim that the script wound up short-listed for the Pulitzer Prize, and the production was slated for a Broadway transfer this fall. As it turned out, the leaves fell, but Detroit never opened. Producers Jeffrey Richards and Jerry Frankel, who had previously guided Steppenwolf's productions of August: Osage County and Superior Donuts to the Great White Way, had been unable to secure a theatre. On her Facebook page, D'Amour offered to friends that the producers had done their best to make the Broadway run happen but "timing was just not on our side this time."

That doesn't mean there isn't a Detroit in New York's future; earlier this month, off-Broadway company Playwrights Horizons announced that it would open its 2012-2013 season with D'Amour's play in a new production to be directed by Anne Kauffman. That news came on the heels of an announcement of Detroit traveling even farther in spring 2012. The National Theatre has scheduled the play's London premiere for May in its 300-seat Cottesloe Theatre with a British cast to be directed by Austin Pendleton, who staged the original Steppenwolf production. D'Amour characterizes the two runs as "a true embarrassment of riches, so many great people and theaters, I can only hope I continue to give them my best."

The Chronicle congratulates D'Amour on all of her 2011 successes and fully expects that 2012 will hold more of the same. We just wish we could rework the map to move Detroit to Austin.