In Detroit, Michigan another auto factory is reaching the end of the line. And to the people who work there, it’s more than a money problem.
In Dominique Morriseau’s 2016 drama, the US playwright explores both the dignity of labour and the trap of labour by showing how utterly dependent on her four working class Black characters are on their jobs. At the most extreme example there’s Faye (Pamela Nomvete), the seen-it-all union rep who we come to realise is actually living in the factory. There’s Shanita (Racheal Ofori), a pregnant single mother, whose medical benefits are dependent on the job. Supervisor Reggie (Tobi Bamtefa) has a mortgage to pay. And as for gun-toting youngster Dez (Branden Cook) - is he the one who has been breaking in at night to steal stuff?
What Morriseau does extremely well is bring together four well-rounded characters - each of whom appears to have a full life off stage, only glancingly alluded to here - and show their lives through the prism of work. Admittedly we don’t ever see them working: the play is set entirely in a staff common room, though in Matthew Xia’s production the nature of their jobs is brought home by pummelling industrial light and sound during the scene transitions.
Although matters get gradually more fraught, it’s not quite a tragedy - the endgame is more the exposing of these superficially tough people’s vulnerabilities than their actual destruction.
The tough but troubled turn from Nomvete as Faye is the best performance and the key to the story: in a way she feels like the avatar of the industry itself - proud, talented and running out of time, she tries to keep going against the odds but reality is catching up with her as she frets she won’t quite make it to the more generous 30-year retirement package. It’s the play’s choicest part – and no wonder veteran US actor Phylicia Rashad bagged her second Tony for the role when ‘Skeleton Crew’ ran on Broadway in 2021.
It does feel like a very American story. Britain is hardly free from industrial decline. But here these people would expect help from the state. In America, there is something deeply troubling about how their jobs dictate their lives. It’s not simply that it’s sad they’ll lose income, but rather that – to a European eye – it seems fearsomely wrong that so much of their access to society is dictated by the whims of a private employer.
It’s good, but to be an unbearable theatre wonk I wonder if it was best programmed so soon after last year’s Donmar production of Lynn Nottage’s phenomenal ‘Clyde’s’, which explores many of the same themes (and just five years after Nottage’s monumental ‘Sweat’, which is even more explicitly about the fallout of deindustrialisation on American factory workers). ‘Skeleton Crew’ was a late replacement in the programme for Eboni Booth’s Pulitzer-winner ‘Primary Trust’, and I wonder if that might have rounded out the season a bit better: I don’t want to be down on Morriseau, but Nottage is one of the world’s greatest living playwrights and putting ‘Skeleton Crew’ and ‘Clyde’s’ within eight months of each other invites comparison that ‘Clyde’s’ fairly effortlessly comes out on top in – richer, braver, more daring, more emotional.
Nonetheless, it’s a fine play with something to say about work in America, a modest but worthwhile end to Michael Longhurst’s era at the Donmar before the razzle-dazzle of his successor Tim Sheader’s new season in the autumn.