“I’m running on my soul now,” Faye tells her boss, Reggie, during a critical confrontation in “Skeleton Crew,” the Dominique Morisseau play that opened Friday at Minneapolis’ Guthrie Theater. Her desperation is palpable but not unique.
All four characters in the two-hour drama are battling for survival in a narrative that centers the salt-of-the-earth American assembly line worker and also elevates these figures with poetic language.
The acting ensemble at the Guthrie added to the play’s mythos Friday by keeping the show aloft even after a medical disruption in the audience caused a delay just three minutes before the end.
The last play in her trilogy about the Motor City, “Skeleton” finds Morisseau continuing to do for Detroit what August Wilson did for Pittsburgh, which is to reveal the resilience and majesty of people who’re otherwise downtrodden and invisible.
She leans into the music of their language, plus their primal wisdom and mother wit. The Guthrie production, which takes place in Regina Garcia’s break-room set, celebrates that rhythm even as things are gritty and dire.
Set in 2008 as the Great Recession continues to bite, “Skeleton” focuses on the last workers in an auto industry stamping plant slated for closure. They function like a messy family, with their longstanding quirks and annoyances leavened by care and love.
Cancer survivor and union rep Faye (Jennifer Fouché) is the anchoring mother figure of the group, and has a soft spot for supervisor Reggie (Darius Dotch), treating him like a son. Faye, who has worked 29 years at the plant and wants to notch 30 to retire, takes the edge off her stress by smoking cigarettes and playing cards for money.
Reggie must negotiate between management, which wants to crack down on workers in order to continue to thin their line, and the workers he came up with.
