The third installment of Dominique Morisseau’s acclaimed trilogy “The Detroit Project,” Skeleton Crew follows four co-workers—Faye, Dez, Reggie and Shanita—at a Detroit auto factory in 2008. This play highlights the layered relationships and drama of blue-collar workers navigating the instability and uncertainty in their personal lives and at work. Each character’s patience and loyalty are tested as the plant’s future comes into question, and they are forced to make hard choices to ensure their individual survival. Morisseau’s masterful command of dialect and dialogue brings depth and authenticity to a story about the very local implications of global change.
Skeleton Crew
Reviews
We need more plays like "Skeleton Crew" in the theater...but we also need plays that aren't afraid to confront an audience with endings that are as complicated and unsatisfying as the issues they are trying to tackle.
Sparked with moments of raw humor, despair, anger, and hope, Skeleton Crew will have you rooting for each and every one of its characters to come out a winner. Get ready to stand up and cheer.
This is the third installment of Dominique Morisseau's acclaimed trilogy “The Detroit Project.” Morisseau's dialect and dialogue offer poignant lines about global change that continues today, even after the recession. Factory workers are a dying breed. What enhances this play is sound designer Everett Elton Bradman's choice of Motown music featuring The Supremes, Michael Jackson and Aretha Franklin.
The cast is brilliant. Caroline Stefanie Clay gives Faye a physical and visceral authenticity that is as heartfelt as it is unsentimental... Director Patricia McGregor keeps the energy focused and the movement flows gracefully. Skeleton Crew is a traditional, structured “well-made” or “talking” play, with little onstage action—and I love that about it.
In any case, the devolution of a once significant plant is a metaphor for the larger story of deindustrialization, the capricious greed of the owner class, and the absence of planning for the future of America's precarious people. The author of Skeleton Crew joins the worthy company of Clifford Odets, Arthur Miller, Lorraine Hansberry, August Wilson and other moral playwrights in making the lives of working-class Americans accessible and comprehensible to the theatergoing public.
We need more plays like "Skeleton Crew" in the theater...but we also need plays that aren't afraid to confront an audience with endings that are as complicated and unsatisfying as the issues they are trying to tackle.
Sparked with moments of raw humor, despair, anger, and hope, Skeleton Crew will have you rooting for each and every one of its characters to come out a winner. Get ready to stand up and cheer.
This is the third installment of Dominique Morisseau's acclaimed trilogy “The Detroit Project.” Morisseau's dialect and dialogue offer poignant lines about global change that continues today, even after the recession. Factory workers are a dying breed. What enhances this play is sound designer Everett Elton Bradman's choice of Motown music featuring The Supremes, Michael Jackson and Aretha Franklin.
The cast is brilliant. Caroline Stefanie Clay gives Faye a physical and visceral authenticity that is as heartfelt as it is unsentimental... Director Patricia McGregor keeps the energy focused and the movement flows gracefully. Skeleton Crew is a traditional, structured “well-made” or “talking” play, with little onstage action—and I love that about it.
In any case, the devolution of a once significant plant is a metaphor for the larger story of deindustrialization, the capricious greed of the owner class, and the absence of planning for the future of America's precarious people. The author of Skeleton Crew joins the worthy company of Clifford Odets, Arthur Miller, Lorraine Hansberry, August Wilson and other moral playwrights in making the lives of working-class Americans accessible and comprehensible to the theatergoing public.