If you’ve ever hung out at a break room at work, you know that generally not very much happens there. People eat snacks, engage in small talk, and generally relax during the few precious minutes they have before resuming their labor. Playwright Dominique Morisseau captures that ambience all too well in her 2016 play now receiving its Broadway premiere courtesy of Manhattan Theatre Club. Stronger on atmosphere than actual drama, Skeleton Crew never proves thematically arresting, although it does earn points for sociological resonance.
That’s because the play – the third entry in Morisseau’s The Detroit Projects Trilogy, which also includes Detroit ’67 and Paradise Blue – takes place at a Motor City automotive plant in 2008, at the height of the Great Recession. So you know that these blue-collar workers are struggling with serious economic issues, including the possibilities of layoffs and the closure of the plant.
Unfortunately, that’s not enough to make for satisfying drama. You also need compelling characters and incidents, and dialogue rich enough to keep us fully engaged over the course of two hours. Too often, you feel this play coasting on its milieu, as if presenting the plight of working class people gasping under the weight of economic inequality was enough.
[Read Melissa Rose Bernardo’s ★★★★☆ review here.]
The characters, all African-American, are Faye (Phylicia Rashad), the hard-edged veteran of the bunch, the workers’ union representative who’s seen it all and has no compunction about routinely disobeying the “No Smoking” signs liberally plastered throughout the room; Dez (Joshua Boone) an ambitious, twentysomething who clearly aspires to a better life and who is revealed early on to secretly carry a gun in his bag; Shanita (Chante Adams, who co-stars with Michael B. Jordan in the recently released film A Journal for Jordan), heavily pregnant and eternally optimistic; and Reggie (Brandon J. Dirden, the stand-out of the cast), the beleaguered foreman who has moved up to a white-collar job but feels torn between satisfying the needs of his workers and the corporate higher-ups.
The playwright attempts to stir up some dramatic tension with a mystery involving a series of thefts of materials from the plant, but it never amounts to much. There seems to be a blossoming romance between Shanita and Dez, but that too feels underdeveloped. And there’s a running gag involving Reggie constantly putting up handwritten signs about various workplace rules that wears thin pretty quickly. The play’s most interesting element proves the complex bond between Faye and Reggie, whose friendship goes back many years.
The play felt more impactful in its original Off-Broadway production at Atlantic Theater Company, the intimacy of which made you feel more immersed in the action. It seems more than a little lost in its much larger Broadway environs, where the actors often struggle to make themselves heard. Director Ruben Santiago-Hudson doesn’t do the production any favors with such theatrical flourishes as the use of irrelevant rap songs, video projections and break-dancing appearances by performer/choreographer Adesola Osakalumi between scenes, which only make an already longish-feeling play feel even longer. It’s hard not to think that the evening would have worked better as a tighter one-act, especially since the intermission accentuates the lack of an engrossing narrative.
Despite the fine acting by the ensemble, Skeleton Crew proves a well-meaning, respectable play that ultimately underwhelms. Clearly indebted to August Wilson, it lacks the poetry that made his dramas seem to pulsate with inner life.
