Review: Ordinary, invisible worker is validated in Guthrie’s gritty, poetic ‘Skeleton Crew’

“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.

The other two figures in the mix have stubborn hope. Dez (Mikell Sapp) is saving up to open his own auto shop, come hell or high water, while a pregnant Shanita (Stephanie Everett) must necessarily think that there’s a future for her unborn child.

Austene Van staged “Skeleton” in February 2020 for Yellow Tree Theatre, where she is artistic director, in a small production that had Sapp and Dotch in the ensemble. Her new mounting may be on a much bigger scale with industrial shadow puppetry and discordant, machine-inflected music between the scenes. But the walls are still closing in.

Van’s production sings with poetry and is directed with humor and a care for the characters. A newcomer to the Twin Cities stage, New Yorker Fouché finds and maintains Faye’s fortitude and dignity, even as we see the direness of her straits.

Dez has secrets and walks with fear. In his bouncy, meticulous movement and delivery, Sapp invests him with passion, slyness and wit. The actor shows Dez’s hot head but also the struggle to restrain his irrational heat.

Similarly, Dotch straddles Reggie’s middle-manager conflicts with confidence. He helps us to appreciate his dilemmas and lets us in enough behind his eye to see how he champions the workers while trying to please management.

Everett, also a newcomer to the Twin Cities, brings a sweetness to Shanita, the most unsettled of the four characters. She nails a humorous bit about how drivers fumble the highway merge, even as her intriguingly drawn figure dances in a balance between hope and harshness.

Like any great art, “Crew” reaches for a kind of alchemy, transforming unease and decline into assurance and elevation. It’s a reminder that as much as we define ourselves by what we do and the struggles that shape our existence, there are other ways to measure our humanity and worth.

Who: Written by Dominique Morisseau and directed by Austene Van.

When: 7:30 p.m. Tue.-Sat., 7 p.m. Sun. Ends June 9.

Where: Guthrie Theater, 818 S. 2nd St., Mpls.

Tickets: $29-$82. 612-377-2224, guthrietheater.org.