‘Skeleton Crew’ Star Phylicia Rashad on Broadway’s Return: ‘Mastery Continues, and Theater Artists and Audiences Are Grateful for This’

variety.com:

Michael Appler On Broadway Wednesday evening, “Skeleton Crew,” the final of seven new plays written by Black playwrights to make its debut this season, opened to an intimate crowd at the Manhattan Theatre Club’s Friedman Theatre.

The show was embraced by an audience that included Danielle Brooks, Denée Benton and La Chanze but stripped, like the factory it depicts, of the usual pomp and circumstance of a flashy Broadway opening.“Skeleton Crew,” the third work in Dominique Morisseau’s trilogy of Detroit-based plays, finds five workers at a Michigan auto factory — dogged by a corroding city around them, the unfeeling unpredictability of their employers and the looming devastation of joblessness as their workplace, the last of the city’s independent auto factories, inevitably closes.

On Broadway, where the cast and crew of “Skeleton Crew” faced a checkered season of cancellations, two opening-night postponements and an industry which nearly shuttered again, Morisseau’s tale of labor and strife fell as purposefully prophetic.“All season, we saw other shows, like other plants, close,” Morisseau said during the opening night current call, flanked by the show’s director, Tony-winner Ruben Santiago-Hudson, and her cast, led by Tony-winner Phylicia Rashad.“I stand here on the shoulders of factory workers who built my family, who built my city, and I don’t know how a theater worker could ever see this play and not see themselves in an auto worker ever again,” she said.“The UAW members who I talked to, they wanted people to know that they don’t just fight for auto workers’ rights,” Morisseau continued. “They fight for human rights, because at the whole of every labor movement is human rights, and so the labor movement which we see.