Auto factory workers fight with dignity
There’s no release valve for the tension in the auto plant break room in “Skeleton Crew.” So unremittingly does heat ratchet up that you might wonder what is it, exactly, that union line workers Faye (Margo Hall), Dez (Christian Thompson) and Shanita (Tristan Cunningham) and their foreman, Reggie (Lance Gardner), are fighting for.
Dominique Morisseau’s play, whose Bay Area premiere opened Tuesday, Jan. 30, at Marin Theatre Company, makes abundantly clear that it isn’t just jobs at stake for these Detroiters confronting the 2008 recession and rumors of their factory’s closure. (The show is a co-production with TheatreWorks, which will bring “Skeleton Crew” to Palo Alto’s Lucie Stern Theatre in March.)
A job, for these workers, doesn’t just stave off the all too imminent threats of hunger and homelessness, nor is it merely the increasingly distant promise of a secure future and a fulfilling career spent building mighty machines. When these characters fight for their jobs, they’re fighting for a whole system of meaning — one where you can marvel at the smart design of a car even as it almost kills you in an accident; one where a man’s perceived sexual prowess depends
on the quality of his wheels; one where families measure their love for one another in their heritage at the factory.
That’s a lot of significance to wrest from every line, and as Morisseau’s dialogue zigs from one life-and-death crisis to another, Jade King Carroll’s direction doesn’t always delineate, beat to beat, the fresh source of friction. All at once, characters might worry about one character’s shelter, the threat of job losses and street violence finding its way into the factory, or, in agonizing about whether the plant will close, they might side with one worker and then immediately turn on her. Cast members sometimes fail to show their characters getting the new ideas that would justify those pivots. It’s as if every concern they might have is foremost in their minds at all times, but if everything is foremost, nothing can be.
Still, the talented cast mostly makes up for muddy moments. Cunningham conveys the nononsense ambition of a pregnant Shanita just in the way she grits her teeth as she magic-markers her name on her salad dressing in the communal fridge. Thompson’s softening from firecracker to mushball at the right words from Shanita reveals a character who’s much more complex than even Dez himself understands. Gardner excels when Morisseau waxes Shakespearean. When Reggie argues that he’s working as hard as he can to protect his unit’s jobs, it’s not just the logic of his case that persuades; it’s his style, the way words pile on top of each other mustering their own inexorable momentum.
And as ever, Hall is a titan of the stage, lording over the dilapidated break room of Ed Haynes’ set — where one couch, tellingly, is a vintage car seat patched with duct tape — with both sprightly mischief and the imperturbable entitlement of a veteran who, before she fights back, asks a foe if they’re really sure they want to fight her.
Part of Morisseau’s point is that all these characters, whom the rest of the world might look down upon, are towering in their strength, noble in their pride. The tragedy of “Skeleton Crew” isn’t so much that they might lose their jobs but that they can’t always see themselves for the kings and queens they are — that they allow the system of the factory, of Detroit, of the country, to reduce them to cogs.