Skeleton Crew
Opening Night: January 26, 2022
Closing: February 20, 2022
Theater: Samuel J. Friedman Theatre
In 2008 Detroit, a small automotive factory is on the brink of foreclosure, and a tight knit family of workers hangs in the balance. With uncertainty everywhere, the line between blue collar and white collar becomes blurred, and this working family must reckon with their personal loyalties, their instincts for survival and their ultimate hopes for humanity.
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January 26, 2022
So begins “Skeleton Crew,” a play by Dominique Morisseau that in considering the ways we must sometimes break rules, breaks none itself. It’s so adroitly built and written — and, in the Manhattan Theater Club production that opened on Wednesday, so beautifully staged and acted — that you hardly have time to decide, until its brisk two hours have passed, whether it’s a comedy or a tragedy. Even then, as in life, you may not know for sure.
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January 26, 2022
But if some of the grit has been lost in Skeleton Crew’s refurbished Broadway form, which also includes flashy video effects, Morisseau’s play remains firmly based in the lives and evocative language of its characters, whom Santiago-Hudson treats with the respect they deserve. They’re flawed but decent people, driven by forces that may or may not be beyond their control.
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January 26, 2022
Directed with vitality by Ruben Santiago-Hudson – his second victory this Broadway season following the fall’s Lackawanna Blues – and performed by an ensemble cast that matches a powerful Phylicia Rashad, Skeleton Crew is a play that feels even more pertinent now than it did when it landed in a stellar Off Broadway production back in 2016. The play was terrific then. It’s essential now.
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January 26, 2022
Like many other productions, “Skeleton Crew” was forced to cancel many preview performances due to positive COVID findings among its company, and its opening night had to be rescheduled twice. Notwithstanding, Ruben Santiago-Hudson’s absorbing production has finally officially opened and was well worth the wait.
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January 26, 2022
The doors haven’t shut — yet — but the walls seem to be closing in irrevocably on the characters in “Skeleton Crew,” Dominique Morisseau’s closely observed, eloquent and deeply compassionate drama about automotive plant workers in Detroit during the Great Recession.
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January 26, 2022
As Black folks like to say, when Dominique Morisseau wrote Skeleton Crew, she put her whole foot in it. For those who aren’t in the know, that means the play is a spectacular blend of lyrical language, political analysis, and delightful humor that prioritizes Black lives and sensibilities over respectability politics.
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January 26, 2022
Faye has been at the plant for a while now; she says the walls talk to her. In many ways, Faye is the plant. So now, with rumors of downsizing and other plants shutting down completely, what is to become of Faye? In Skeleton Crew, Dominique Morriseau’s excellent drama which just premiered on Broadway, it’s a question that approaches with the unhurried, but inevitable, air of tragedy. Set in the break room of a Detroit automobile stamping factory during the Great Recession, it superbly portrays the pitfalls of accomplishing that most American ideal: caring about your job.
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January 26, 2022
Under Ruben Santiago-Hudson’s taut direction, this cast of four is uniformly splendid. Rashad, famous for playing a mother on TV in “The Cosby Show” and on stage in “Blue” and “A Raisin in the Sun,” completely transforms herself into a seasoned factory worker here, and she wears those overalls with absolute confidence. Boone delivers a fierce, raw performance that consistently galvanizes the drama when he’s on stage. Granted, he has a slightly easier task than the other three actors. His Dez character is the only one not infected with a blinding naivete about the world in which they live and work.
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January 26, 2022
Morisseau says she could not have written Skeleton Key without her father, and this may explain the flintiness, anger, wit, and empathy that rise up in contrasting waves through its two-hour path, directed with sensitivity and energy by Tony-winning Ruben Santiago-Hudson.
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January 26, 2022
Morisseau’s play premiered off-Broadway in 2016 at Atlantic Theatre Company with Ruben Santiago-Hudson directing, but the play resonates perhaps even more now than it originally did. Santiago-Hudson helms the production again in its Broadway outing with a phenomenal cast led by Phylicia Rashad and Brandon J. Dirden. With hard times facing blue-collar workers around the country, Morisseau’s play feels more than anything like a tribute to the workers who get far too little recognition for what they do.
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January 26, 2022
Now Skeleton Crew has come to Broadway, produced by Manhattan Theater Club in its Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, a gilded palace of deep-cut rosettes, classical pediments, and, most of all, soaring volumes of space. It’s not always obvious which Off Broadway shows will blossom in a venue like that. Earlier this season, Ruben Santiago-Hudson performed his one-man show at the Friedman, which rang with every word he spoke; he was the clapper inside a huge neoclassical bell. Yet now, working as a director, Santiago-Hudson returns with Skeleton Crew, and there’s far less ease in the way the show uses the room. In the drafty hall, Morisseau’s carefully banked fires start to flicker.
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