Tomé Cousin directs and Etta Cox stars for barebones, in the Tony-nominated Dominique Morisseau play
By SHARON EBERSON
Tomé Cousin’s day launches as a professor of dance at Carnegie Mellon, then moves on to projects with City Theatre and Pittsburgh CLO, and, if that’s not enough, at night you will find him in Braddock, where he is welcomed by billowing smoke and a fiery sky, courtesy of the Edgar Thomson Works.
The US Steel plant looms just across the street from barebones productions, where Cousin is in rehearsal as director of Dominique Morisseau’s 2022 Tony-nominated Skeleton Crew.
The play gave Phylicia Rashad her second Tony, in a role played for barebones by Etta Cox. The first lady of Pittsburgh jazz portrays Faye, a tough factory worker, union leader and matriarch of her young crew members, played by Brenden Peifer and Saige Smith, with Mario Quinn Lyles.
Richard McBride (Billy Strayhorn: Something to Live For at Pittsburgh Public Theater) plays the manager of their Detroit auto factory, which is on the brink of closing as the Great Recession of 2008 picks up steam.
Skeleton Crew is the third play in Morisseau’s Detroit Project, inspired by African-American playwrights, which also includes Paradise Blue and Detroit ’67.
Cousin did choreography and intimacy work on the former for City Theatre, and directed the latter at CMU.
“Of the three that I’ve experienced, I think [Skeleton Crew] is the most personable one,” Cousin said. “Her characters are always relatable, she’s such a genius writer, but this one in particular, the relationships are so dependent on each other, and there seems to be a parental atmosphere the other plays don’t have. So I think that’s the key to everything, and how I look at it.”
He thought of Cox, whom he first saw onstage in 1980, as Dorothy in The Wiz.
“She was in my very first musical that I ever directed,” Cousin said of Blues in the Night, when City Theatre was a resident company at Hartwood Acres. “And I’ve worked with her four different times, throughout my career as a director.”
The show reunites him with others from those days, including set designer Tony Ferrieri and lighting designer Andrew David Ostrowski, who also have a long-running relationship with Patrick Jordan’s barebones company.
As with many theatrical productions these days, Skeleton Crew’s road to Pittsburgh begins in the prepandemic Befor Times, when Jordan saw it at the Atlantic Theater in 2016.
He sought the rights quickly, not considering it would be headed to Broadway, down the road. Then there were obstacles in getting the play to the stage, “and then the pandemic happened, so it went on the back burner,” said Jordan.
Barebones retained the rights to Skeleton Crew, and when the time was right, artistic director Jordan said, “I started from scratch.”
Cousin had worked with Jordan’s company on the moves for Dance Nation, and his experience with Morisseau’s work seemed like the perfect place to restart the process.
“Tomé was into it, and I dig his take on these things and this particular show, and it worked out really well,” Jordan said. “And then, what the hell, Etta Cox was available!”
Among the attractions’ to Morisseau’s work, though told as a Detroit story, was that Jordan immediately could envision a play about factory workers and their entwined fateed being told in his black box theater, beside the monstrous steel plant.
He and his director get a jolt of that juxtaposition on a daily basis.
“Every day we come in, you have to drive through it, and it’s pretty amazing that it is part of the setup across the street,” Cousin said. “And so yeah, that just expresses a lot of the industrial ideal of the play, which is really nice to have next door.”
TICKETS AND DETAILS
Barebones productions presents Skeleton Crew at barebones black box theater, 1211 Braddock Ave., Braddock, February 23-March 10, 2024. Tickets: https://barebonesproductions.ticketspice.com/skeleton-crew.
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