‘Friends and family were afraid, anxious, heartbroken’: Dominique Morisseau on the decline of Detroit | Theatre

In the late 2000s, Detroit went from being a prosperous city offering hundreds of thousands of jobs in car factories to undergoing a catastrophic decline. As three major car manufacturers in “the automobile capital of the world” endured massive losses, promises of stable livelihoods and decent pensions for the working-class citizens of Detroit dissipated.

For the award-winning playwright Dominique Morisseau, the fall of Detroit – the city she was born and grew up in – was not just a series of shocking news headlines but a stark reality for many people she cared about. “I saw friends and family members take severances from their jobs and walk away from the factory,” she says. “They were afraid, anxious, frustrated and heartbroken.”

The experience was the inspiration for her Tony award-winning play Skeleton Crew, now at the Donmar Warehouse in London, directed by Olivier award-winning multi-hyphenate Matthew Xia. “As a working-class director who spent a long time as a hip-hop DJ, there is a natural affinity with the world she conjures,” Xia says.

Despite now living in Los Angeles, Morisseau talks to me over a video call from a family member’s home in Detroit. The 46-year-old is visiting the city with her husband (also from Detroit) and their three-year-old son for a family reunion. For Morisseau, her plays are an attempt to “impact my corner of the world in some way,” she says, mentioning that she sees her work as a form of activism and a way to turn the narrative of Detroit on its head. “There was a moment in time where, if you were from Detroit and you went to any other city, people looked at you a certain way like they didn’t want you there,” she explains, pointing out that Detroit has a majority Black population (almost 80%, according to recent data). “I care about what I’m doing and that when I tell my son what I believe in, my walk matches my talk.”

Inspired by a series of 10 plays by the renowned American playwright August Wilson called The Pittsburgh Cycle, Skeleton Crew is the final work in a three-play undertaking called The Detroit Project. “The trio takes those [who] history might seek to forget and elevates them,” says Xia. “It scrawls their names, their lives, their struggles and contributions large in our collective memory.” While Skeleton Crew is set during the 2008 recession, Detroit 67 takes place during the 1967 Detroit Riots, and Paradise Blue follows the owner of a jazz club in 1949 just before redevelopment plans displaced Black families and businesses.

Morisseau hopes that her plays will resonate with people both inside and outside her community and has worked on various initiatives to encourage people from all backgrounds to see them (and feel comfortable doing so). One of these is by handing out a Rules of Engagement flyer or “permissions” at her plays to encourage attendees to “laugh audibly”. The idea came to Morisseau after she noticed groups of people, including herself, were being “policed” in their response to scenes in a show. “The theatre has conditioned people to believe that some attendees are guests and some are residents,” she says. “People get nervous that you’re going to ruin their experience of something, and if I say this is allowed for my work, then when it’s happening, people don’t have to feel like their experience is being ruined and realise that they may even be encountering the work as it’s intended.”

Morisseau believes that of her three plays in The Detroit Project, Skeleton Crew resonates most with her own lived experience, especially as she began writing it only a couple of years after the incidents it reflects on. It is “based on members of my family, my friends and the community that I come from”. Faye, a formidable 50-year-old matriarch who has worked at her factory for almost three decades, is “loosely based” on her aunty, who lost her home during Detroit’s decline. “Everybody kept saying ‘Let Detroit go bankrupt’” when Detroit’s struggles began, she recalls, referencing a repeated phrase that started as the headline of a widely read 2008 New York Times op-ed by the politician Mitt Romney, where he proposed a reduction to the benefits and pay of retirees and car factory workers in Detroit. “I remember that phrase a lot because I didn’t understand what was happening and why everybody was losing their homes,” she says. “I think people were picturing big CEOs flying their jets to Washington and not my aunt who got narcoleptic working triple overtime in the factory.”

But, more than a decade on, Morisseau has noticed positive changes in Detroit. While gentrification is still an issue, “there are not as many big developers coming in and buying up all the cheap property in the city, so you see businesses coming back”. She believes Skeleton Crew also “changes the face” of who people consider to be in America’s Rust Belt, the parts of the United States that once relied heavily on now outdated factories and technology, such as Michigan, Ohio and Illinois. “It was always said that Trump did so well with them [in the 2016 elections], but he didn’t; he did well with the white residents in the Rust Belt,” she says. According to the largest daily newspaper in Detroit, Detroit Free Press, “Hillary Clinton trounced Trump, winning 95% of the vote to his 3%”. Morisseau adds: “It’s about changing the face of the working class as we don’t have enough working-class solidarity, and his rich-silver-spoon-in-his-mouth self was able to make them think that he is more their advocate than the labourer next to them who is of a different race or culture. He’s not of their class and never has been, so we’re watching some well-crafted sorcery, but the magic will wear off.”

After a lengthy period focused on Detroit, Morisseau is now looking further afield. Her play Bad Kreyol, which follows an American who visits her cousin in Port-au-Prince, the capital of Haiti, will premiere at Signature theatre in New York in the autumn. She is also currently writing a play about DJs in the Bronx: “It’s about different generations’ relationship to music, about being digitised, the erasure of hand labour jobs, and it explores ideas on what is dividing different generations from respecting each other.” For Morisseau, the process of making the play is the most significant achievement, rather than the outcome. “It’s the writing of it and the capturing of people that is the victory,” she says. “If anyone else can hear and see these people and feel them as deeply as I feel them, then that will be another victory.”