Susan Granger’s review of “Skeleton Crew” (Manhattan Theatre Club/Samuel J. Friedman Theater)
Set in a break room at an automotive sheet-metal-stamping plant in Detroit during the winter of 2008, Dominique Morisseau’s new play evokes employee vulnerability when rumors of a permanent shutdown begin circulating.
As this drama about kinship and class opens, Faye (Phylicia Rashad) is sitting at a table on which there’s a prominent “No Smoking” sign.
Flouting the rules by puffing away on a cigarette, Faye is the brassy union leader of UAW 167, which may be why the plant foreman Reggie (Brandon J. Dirden), son of her deceased lover, decides to confide in her that management has decided to shut down the facility.
Although she’s a breast-cancer survivor and currently living out of her car, Faye is desperately hoping to make it to 30 years on the assembly line so she can collect her pension. Which may be why she agrees not to tell her younger co-workers that they’re going to be laid off.
Shanita (Chante Adams) is pregnant but seemingly estranged from the baby’s father. She’s proud of the work she does, relishing what she perceives as her job security: “I love the way the line needs me. You step away, the whole operation shuts down.”
Shanita perpetually bickers with Dez (Joshua Boone), who is obviously crazy about her. Dez is ambitious, planning to open his own repair shop.
But then a series of robberies hits the plant. Suspicion falls on Dez, who is not only hiding a gun but a mysteriously wrapped pouch in his locker.
Caught between his working-class background and current ‘management’ position, Reggie promises Faye that he will do his best to help Shanita and Dez, among others, explaining, “I’m sick of walking that line – line that say I’m over here and you over there, even though we started with the same dirt on our shoes.”
Timely and political, this is the final installment of Morisseau’s haunting “Detroit Project” trilogy, which premiered at the Atlantic Company in 2016. Dominiue Morisseau, who won the 2018 MacArthur “Genius Grant” Fellowship, creates vibrant characters whose tenuous dilemma is all-too-real.
Directed by Ruben Santiago-Hudson, it’s a taut, well-cast character study of African-Americans who are striving for the American Dream which now seems out of reach.