Dominique Morisseau
Dominique Morisseau (Facebook photo)
Detroit-born playwright Dominique Morisseau lives in New York and North Hollywood, but hasn't forgotten her roots.
“Skeleton Crew,” the final play in her prize-winning Detroit trilogy, begins previews Wednesday in New York, Alexis Soloski writes in The New York Times.
The play is set in 2008 and centers on several workers and a manager in the last small auto plant standing, the Times reports.
The paper writes that Morisseau, who studied at the University of Michigan, got her ideas for her plays from the many friends and relatives affected by factory closings or house foreclosures, and an encounter her and her husband, musician James Keys, also a Detroit native, had with a homeless woman living out of her car.
As the story goes, Morisseau and her husband had returned to Detroit a few years ago and on the way to a wedding they spotted a woman in her car that was packed with belongings. They talked to her and gave her some money, the Times reports.
“It felt perverted,” said Ms. Morisseau, 37, according to the article.
“This is the Motor City. This is where people make cars. Now it’s become a city where people are living in their cars.”
Her other plays include “Detroit ’67” and “Sunset Baby,” a contemporary play about a father jailed for activities in the black power movement and his grifter daughter, The Times reports.
