We check out rehearsals for the Bay Area premiere of “Skeleton Crew.”
If you haven’t spent much time in Detroit, or if you haven’t seen Dominique Morisseau’s “Skeleton Crew,” you might have a picture of auto plant work as menial, or as interchangeable with any other blue-collar job.
A stirring monologue in the first act of the play, whose Bay Area premiere begins previews Thursday, Jan. 25, in a co-production by Marin Theatre Company and TheatreWorks, tackles that assumption head-on.
“I’m building something that you can see come to life at the end,” says Shanita (Tristan Cunningham) of her work on the factory floor. “Got a motor in it and it’s gonna take somebody somewhere.” As she and her fellow line workers Faye (Margo Hall) and Dez (Christian Thompson) as well as foreman Reggie (Lance Gardner) confront the possibility that their plant might be closing — the show’s set in 2008, just as the recession hits — much more is at stake in the work than a mere paycheck.
“There’s such pride in it,” says director Jade King Carroll, who’s originally from Woodstock, N.Y., before a recent rehearsal at Marin Theatre. For the play’s characters, “it’s not just Motor City; it’s like, we are the motor of this city.”
“No matter what plant you’re at, you’re part of something so large and magnificent and important to so many people,” says Morisseau over the phone from Los Angeles, where she writes for “Shameless.” Though Morisseau has never worked in a plant herself, she’s a Detroit native (a background she also drew on in writing the book for Berkeley Rep’s “Ain’t Too
Proud — The Life and Times of the Temptations”). “If you’re from Detroit, even if you’ve never worked in a factory, you have a family member or somebody in your life” who has, she says.
Morisseau was spurred to write the play by the idea to “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt,” a notion perhaps most notoriously put forward in an eponymous New York Times opinion piece by Mitt Romney in 2008. “I kept thinking, ‘Let Detroit Go Bankrupt’? Why? Why would you say that?” she recalls. That was a moment of deep populist anger at mismanagement by the financial industry, “but I kept thinking about the workers — not the big banks, not the big CEOs who are taking jets . ... I’m thinking about the real people who represent Detroit, and (‘Let Detroit Go Bankrupt’) just felt so dismissive of their contribution to the industry and what it would do them.”
There’s no side character in “Skeleton Crew.” Each of the four is in his or her own desperate situation, with a full narrative arc and difficult decisions to make — a trait Carroll attributes to Morisseau’s experience as an actor, of having “lived inside so many roles.” (The two, longtime collaborators, first worked together as director and actor, on Zakiyyah Alexander’s “The Etymology of Bird” in New York in 2010.)
“As an actor, I’ve always wanted to have a certain kind of material, so as a writer I think I write the kind of material I’d like myself, as an actor, to play,” Morisseau says. “I’m not very conscious about it . ... It’s just sort of in my DNA as an artist now.”
She notes that originally, she assumed she would need more than at least two more characters for “Skeleton Crew.” But asking herself, “Who do I need to tell this story, truly?” made her think, “I’m not really feeling the need for anyone else other than these four.” Actors, she says, “want to have purpose when we’re on stage, and I try to write from that perspective.”
“Skeleton Crew” is part of a trilogy of plays together called “The Detroit Project (A 3-Play Cycle)” and whose other scripts include “Paradise Blue,” set in the 1940s, and “Detroit ’67.” Looking at Detroit’s representation throughout the trilogy, Carroll sees the city as “starting to pull apart” in “Paradise Blue”; then “burning” in “Detroit ’67,” centering on the 1967 riots that ravaged the city; then “dissolving” in “Skeleton Crew.”
Morisseau says she picked those three eras because “they were pivotal in changing the landscape of our city, and they were just three eras that were completely different in style, in sound, in culture, in look, in language, in slang” — the noir and jazz of the 1940s, the Motown of the 1960s, the hip-hop of J Dilla in the early 2000s.
She cautions that “Skeleton Crew” is not a eulogy for Detroit, even as her characters confront “a sense of impending doom or inevitability.”
“They have to figure out how they’re going to carry on forward,” she says. “That’s a metaphor for Detroit even right now. We’ve been marked by doom by the media so much; we’ve been considered a failed city. ... We’re still living and breathing, and yet people are writing our epitaph.” “Skeleton Crew,” she adds, is partly about “pushing through, defying that epitaph of the city.”