Review: Doing the Fast Work of Hard Work in ‘Skeleton Crew’


The structure of the joke is excellent: In the old break room of the metal stamping factory, a 60-year-old woman lights a cigarette under a sign that reads “No Smoking Faye” – the “Faye” part manually added in large, angry letters.

Naturally, as we soon learned, he is is Faye.

This is how Dominique Morisseau’s “Skeleton Crew” game begins, where sometimes when we think we should break the rules, we don’t break any of them. So masterfully constructed and written – and Manhattan Theater Club production Opened on Wednesday, it’s so beautifully staged and acted that you hardly have time to decide if it’s a comedy or a tragedy until two hours have passed. Even then, as in life, you may not know for sure.

Start with Faye, who has worked at the factory for 29 years; At the age of 30, he plans to hang on until his pension increases significantly. as he played Phylicia Rashad In a wonderfully unpretentious performance donning flannel shirts, oversized jeans, work boots, and a sour expression of satisfaction, she seemed to have her life in tight control—and her coworkers as the union rep and break room aunt live on as well. As “The Skeleton Crew” reveals just in time, she exemplifies frankness and self-confidence, distributing wisdom and correcting their stupidity even when the two clash.

You could call Faye’s expertise, like that of the game, clarity on moral ambiguity. And in Detroit in 2008, there’s a lot of moral ambiguity to float around, as the national economy is on a “dump fire” (as one TV news snippet tells us) and the auto industry in particular is collapsing.

For Reggie, the unit foreman and author of the no smoking sign, the pressure is almost too much to bear. Under the burden of knowing in advance that the plant will close within the year, it falls to him to keep productivity high as workers are freed. But despite his tie and white collar, his is a blue-collar soul and awesome Brandon J. Dirden It shows how close the contradictory pull of work and society comes to strangling him as he tries to protect his remaining crew of skeletons.

Apart from Faye, this team includes Shanita (Chanté Adams) and Dez (Joshua Boone), both of whom are under 30 years old and will therefore lose more (or less?) than Faye. Theirs is a classic “plan B,” but the comic and romantic contrast their story provides is more complex than its bald structural purpose suggests.

Yes, Dez has long been in love with Shanita, who is pregnant with a different man. Sweetly, she takes him to his car every day; tartly, she even lets him. But both have existential anxieties that intertwine and deepen with the game’s larger issues. How can Shanita raise a child alone if the cornerstone of her self-confidence – her job – crumbles under her? How will Dez survive in a world that sees his labor as less expendable than his existence? (Even though all four characters are Black, racism is more of a datum than a theme.)

These questions seem unlikely to be answered satisfactorily when a gun comes into the picture with perfect timing.

In reality, some plotting tools, neat parallels, and red herring, like Faye, are a bit squeaky-eyed in use. But that doesn’t prevent them from working; it is indeed a pleasure to surrender to classical craftsmanship. While you can certainly feel his debt to August Wilson in Morisseau’s dramaturgy – “Skeleton Crew” is part of it. A trilogy of works set in Detroitaspect Wilson had the Pittsburgh Loop – you also feel the brute efficiency of Ibsen’s problematic games and best television procedures.

Ruben Santiago-Hudson’s staging at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater is evolving in many ways. The film he directed for the Atlantic Theater Company in 2016makes the most of the larger space and excellent new cast. Worn out in its previous version, Michael Carnahan’s expansive set transforms dirt into a kind of dough poem, from peeling linoleum to succulents barely surviving in a translucent window. The costumes by Emilio Sosa provide both psychology and sociology even with a limited number of tailoring moves: a “Juicy” sweatshirt for Shanita, a fleece sweater vest for Reggie.

As in the city center, I’m less convinced in the midst of robot-like events. popping and shaking (choreographed and performed by Adesola Osakalumi), along with projections by Nicholas Hussong, brings to mind the arduous and repetitive labor that takes place beyond the break room. Rather than enhance our understanding of the characters, these dance moments, however surprising they may be, seem irrelevant and ambiguous, undermining the game’s insistence on valuing workers and not just work.

At its best, preachy “Skeleton Crew” apps; Its characters are not just the building blocks of a moral tale, they are a delight for actors to play and therefore for audiences to experience. Especially in the scenes between Faye and Reggie, you won’t be able to close your eyes to the many things Rashad and Dirden have been doing at the same time over the years as they start using every tool they can get their hands on on stage. Colleague solidarity, contempt, fear, compassion – and a shared history saved for a late explanation – are all here. What comes out of this is the richness of great performance.

If the game itself is sometimes overly rich, it’s not malnourished. Real things are at stake for the characters, who await a respectable reward for their hard work and loyalty. Having their expectations so grossly disappointed makes it difficult to do the right thing in a world that isn’t like this, and tragedy can easily follow.

Perhaps what drives the “Skeleton Crew” in the other direction is the way it rejects cynicism in favor of connection. Although Faye at one point said, “I don’t follow any rules but necessity” – to the perfect surprise – necessity is sometimes synonymous with love.

Skeleton crew
at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater in Manhattan until February 20; manhattantheatreclub.com. Working time: 2 hours.



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