Skeleton Crew is closed.
Following years of critical acclaim and celebrated productions across the country, Dominique Morisseau’s play Skeleton Crew arrives on Broadway starring stage and screen legend Phylicia Rashad.
At the last remaining auto plant in Detroit of 2008, rumors of an impending closure have everyone on edge. The workers are family, but events will test their loyalty as the factory enters its final days. Skeleton Crew is a truthful, sometimes hilarious, often tragic story of American blue collar workers living at the mercy of larger forces out of their control.
Tony Award winner and six time Emmy Award-nominee Phylicia Rashad stars in the Skeleton Crew Broadway premiere. The play is Rashad’s first Broadway role since 2009, when she replaced Estelle Parsons in the hit play August: Osage County. Prior to that, Rashad starred in her sister Debbie Allen’s all-Black revival of Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in 2008.
Skeleton Crew originated at Atlantic Theater Company, an Off-Broadway hub of exciting new work. The play first ran in Atlantic’s development space Atlantic Stage 2 in 2016. It later transferred to the Linda Gross Theater, a larger space also operated by Atlantic. Skeleton Crew was listed by American Theatre Magazine as the third most produced play in the United States in 2018.
Tony Award winner Ruben Santiago-Hudson returns to Manhattan Theatre Club directly following the run of his own solo work, Lackawanna Blues, at the company’s Broadway space, the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre. Santiago-Hudson directs Skeleton Crew and is also now an artistic advisor at MTC.
Critic Ben Brantley of The New York Times declared Skeleton Crew “a very fine new play - warm blooded, astute and beautifully acted,” selecting it as a ‘Critic’s Pick.’
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.
Make no bones about it! Dominique Morisseau's play Skeleton Crew will offer $30 rush tickets for the entirety of its Broadway run. The show, mounted by Manhattan Theatre Club, will perform at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre from December 21 to February 20, with an opening night of January 12.
Phylicia Rashad will star in the Broadway premiere of Dominique Morisseau’s Skeleton Crew, and a performance schedule has also been confirmed.
You might think a play set in a factory would be dank and depressing. But when you have Dominique Morisseau as the playwright, the factory doesn’t just come alive; it literally dances.
UPDATE: Skeleton Crew is at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre from Dec. 22, 2021. Find out more about Skeleton Crew on Broadway here. It is 2008 and the Great Recession is rolling over Detroit. The government bailout, which actually did save the US auto industry when it arrived much later in the C-suites, comes too late to bail out the paycheck-to-paycheck lifers struggling on the factory floor... Read more