In 'Skeleton Crew,' Motor City woes surface in a break room where other breaks open up

Faye feels at home in break room.

Banter among co-workers favors superficial joking, but over time can reveal personalities with a full range of ambition and peril. In Dominique Morrisseau's "Skeleton Crew," the joshing, gossip, and needling in the break room take place against a context of auto-industry shrinkage in Detroit that threatens jobs and the identities linked to them.

Summit Performance Indy opens a run of the hard-wrought comedy tonight at Phoenix Theatre's Basile Stage. Seen at dress rehearsal Thursday evening, the production elaborately ties together the playwright's crowded assemblage of insights and escape routes among four factory workers. 

Between scenes, the repetitive routine of machines and workers is seen pantomimed through a translucent wall of glass. Credit to MeJah Balam's scenic design and Laura E. Glover's lighting for juxtaposing the two sides of life on "the floor." Reminders of the assembly line are never far away from the break-room interactions of veteran Faye, foreman Reggie, and competent but differently motivated young line workers Shanita and Dez. Moving into the foreground for them all is the threat of plant closings in an anxious domestic auto industry.

Chatter about work-life balance in society tends to focus on the middle class, which is always poised to claim it against pressures that threaten its collapse. For blue-collar workers, the play instructs us, work and life are less in balance than they are perpetually locked in a struggle for survival and meaning. These Detroiters have a sense of their own worth, but are long past expecting that sense to be confirmed by their employers or the larger world. 

Director Melissa Mowry allows the cast to own all dimensions of Morrisseau's characters in full. These are not sketches, and the task of making them full-bodied was obviously challenging: they have a lot to say, and the layers must be peeled away. But through gesture and facial expression — there are times when you just want to study those looks amid the profusion of passionate and wistful words — the actors put nuanced shading into what might have been stark line drawings if the production did not go beyond its obligation to "represent."

Dwandra Nickole's Faye seems to own the place from the moment she walks in as the play opens. Her wisdom is obliquely but generously applied in the course of the first act.  She's guarded in ways that break down in the second act. Initially she has warned: "Leave me to my own stink and don't go trying to air me out." When Faye's vulnerability becomes more explicit, Nickole displayed a heart-rending command of Faye's revelations and neediness.

Reggie warns Dez he better get his act together.

This union activist has both personal and professional links to Reggie, played with a steady but aggrieved feeling for both justice and upward mobility by Daniel A. Martin. Characters caught in between two conflicting statuses are catnip to a playwright's exercise of virtuosity, and Morrisseau's control is obvious in the depth and anguished poise of Martin's portrayal.

Akili Ni Mali is charming as Shanita, a worker who actually believes in her contribution to car
manufacture and links it to her idealism about the prospects of the child she is carrying. 

Shanita gets acquainted with Dez's perspective.

Also capable but much more restless and cynical about life is Dez, one of those young men who forever stray into trouble and grow a hard shell of resistance even as they seek an escape. Kerrington Shorter projected Dez's street smarts as well as his veiled openness to being believed in if given the chance.  That quality makes credible the development of his friendship with Shanita, once their customary exchanges of suggestive remarks and barbed retorts give way to the need to face reality. 

Here's the reality: All around these characters are ghosts of shuttered car factories, and they are the skeleton crew rattling in the closet of American prosperity. Their fates become vital as the play progresses toward an affirmation of human connectedness, despite the fated disintegration of their lives under the system they serve. That affirmation makes this searing drama finally a comedy, emblematic of an aspect of contemporary life in which removal is more common than renewal. In this production, it's a diary of ordinary lives as firmly purposeful and focused as a stamping plant.

[Photos by Emily Schwank]