Stephen King – Skeleton Crew Audiobook

How can you walk a line which keeps disintegrating beneath you? The characters in “Skeleton Crew,” that the very nice new drama by Dominique Morisseau that opened on Tuesday night at the Atlantic Stage 2, traveling an uncertain path between insanity and comfort, lawfulness and criminality, mutual assistance and blinkered selfishness.
You might increase the list that most conventional of opposites, the good and the bad. Then again, are integrity cheap luxuries when your overriding concern is to avoid linking the homeless? What are your obligations to anybody else when it’s all you can do to prevent yourself from slipping over the edge? Stephen King – Skeleton Crew Audiobook.
These questions are being continuously weighed, lost and picked up once more in this warm-blooded, astute and beautifully acted four-character drama, the next installment in Ms. Morisseau’s trilogy of plays place in Detroit. I suppose you could say these are questions that to a degree haunt everyone in these Darwinian jungles where we fight for our own paychecks.
But the time and place of “Skeleton Crew,” directed with a slow hands and a quick heartbeat by Ruben Santiago-Hudson, gives these problems a deadly urgency. It is 2008, the height of the Great Recession (whose consequences on a really different degree are depicted in the film “The Big Short”), also we are in hard-hit Detroit, in a car stamping mill called “the last small plant status.” Needless to say, it’s standing on shaky ground. She goes on: “One moment you passin’ the girl on the freeway holdin’ up the ‘will work for food’ signal. Next moment, you sleepin’ in your car.” Stephen King Skeleton Crew Audiobook Free. Faye’s dogged insistence that she will always be a survivor makes you only a bit apprehensive because of her. It is, in many ways, an old-fashioned drama: naturalistic, closely structured and full of self-defining monologues of vernacular lyricism. So necessarily does the fantastic Pittsburgh cycle of August Wilson, which Ms. Morisseau cites as an abiding influence.
However, “Skeleton Crew” can be squarely in the tradition of Arthur Miller’s probing studies of consciences under siege and the crippling concessions made in the title of success. It is, in other words, a deeply moral and deeply American play, using a loving compassion for those trapped within a system that makes sins religious or societal, and self-betrayal almost inevitable.
Ms. Morisseau works her big themes on a small, closely patterned canvas. The activity occurs entirely in an automobile factory’s rest room (equipped with long-lived-in shabbiness by Michael Carnahan, together with mortuary lighting by Rui Rita), where three co-workers punch in, play with cards, snack and trade ominous water-cooler gossip.
They are the aforementioned Faye, their union representative who has been around the meeting line for 29 years; the combustible Dez , that has ambitions for a lifetime beyond the factory; and Shanita, a visibly pregnant single mum to be, along with a second-generation line employee. Skeleton Crew Audiobook by Stephen King.
Then there is the guy who made good, Reggie (Wendell B. Franklin), their foreman, captured between obligations to employees and management. There is a chip on his shoulder, but even he does not know which way it leans. Faye is a old family friend, also in confiding to her that the plant will be shutting down, Reggie puts her at a similarly uneasy position.
Add for this teasing sexual chemistry involving Dez and Shanita, and rumors that someone is stealing parts from the plant, which is downsizing all along, and you get a tidy set up for conflicts. And, yes, we all know early that somebody is packing a gun.
However, this production gently confounds expectations. It is not that what occurs is unforeseeable; every revelation (with one late-arriving exception) makes great sense. What surprises is the way the script constantly stops short of melodrama. Skeleton Crew Audiobook Download Free.
Ms. Morisseau is less interested in igniting the sensationalism for which her storyline would appear to be wired than in rendering lives which, even in crisis, retain their quotidian flow, because lifetime, after all, has a way of going on. And as written, performed and directed, each character is different fluidly and comprehensibly inside that stream.
The well-tuned outfit guarantees that these characters never slide into stereotype. Ms. Gravatt’s fully embodied Faye would at first seem to be the classic, bluff and gruff truth teller. However, as we know about her past – and present – we view the kinks and chinks inside the hearty presence. Skeleton Crew Audiobook Free. She becomes adorable and infinitely more likable.
Mr. Franklin does a skillful slow burn off as a puzzled, honorable man who’d surely do the ideal thing if he could figure out what it was. As Dez, the compelling Mr. Dirden is prickly, randy, reckless and also a born gentleman. And he and Ms. Mathis, who endows her character with a sensuous spontaneity that keeps her justifiable wariness, render Dez and Shanita’s hesitant courtship as a poignant melding of affinity and requirement.
Resonant images recur and replicate through “Skeleton Crew” — cars that break down but also save lives; crumbling ghost mills; lungs along with the consequences of breathing. But they are conceits that grow out of just how these figures see and talk. Stephen King – Skeleton Crew Audiobook.