As the years progress, we become increasingly aware of how parts of our social circles overlap. The neighbor who went to school with us may move to another city yet, thanks to social media, can now stay in touch online without incurring expensive long distance phone bills. Not only does social media allow us to categorize our friends into niche groups (book clubs, alumni associations, volunteer organizations), we can still vicariously feel as if we play an active role in each other's lives. A new generation of entrepreneurs has even discovered ways to build a following of "friends" while tracing their genome!
Just as relatives can get married, move to another town, raise a family and eventually die, so can friends from our professional lives. The people we once saw every day and treated as members of our "work family" can take another job, lose interest in our friendship, and replace our once cherished spot in their lives with new friends, acquaintances, and lovers. As can we.
Alas, time waits for no one. Although we may frequently think of old friends with great fondness and wonder what's happening in their lives, constant waves of distraction prevent us from acting on our thoughts. While we may remember the names, quirks, and shared history with people we once held dear, years may pass before we reconnect (if indeed we ever do).
Extended families often surprise us. Soon after I joined Facebook, I heard from a woman I dated back in the 1960s when we were attending Brooklyn College. Last year, I had lunch with a close friend from elementary and junior high school. Even with such large gaps to fill in, the conversation was warm and flowed easily.
In order to build a basis for any kind of friendship, a lot of time must be spent together. In the early stages of a friendship, those shared experiences may not be counted as quality time. But as one grows and matures, they tend to ripen, aging like a good cheese or wine.
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Watching Brett Hanover's new film, Rukus, offers a peculiar challenge to any viewer. Should one keep watching this bland, pretentious, and ultimately self-defeating 86-minute-long semi-documentary to see where it is going? Or can one find a better use for their time? In his promotional material, Hanover describes his film as follows:"A hybrid of documentary and fiction, Rukus is a fictionalized personal account of coming of age in Memphis at the turn of the century; a queer coming-of-age story set in the liminal spaces of furry conventions, southern punk houses, and virtual worlds. Rukus is a 20-year-old furry artist, living with his boyfriend, Sable, in the suburbs of Orlando, Florida.
In his sketchbooks, Rukus is constructing an imaginary universe -- a sprawling graphic novel in which painful childhood memories are restaged as an epic fantasy. He crosses paths with Brett, a 16-year-old filmmaker with OCD, who is working on a documentary about kinky subcultures in spite of his own anxiety. After an interview leads to an online friendship, their lives entwine in ways that push them into strange, unexplored territories. This feature-length video project is based on work begun in collaboration with furry artist Rukus that was left unfinished after his death in 2008."
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| Brett Hanover in a scene from Rukus |
Hanover's film supposedly began as a high school project after he became interested in the furry subculture. It could also be that the furry convention which came to a local Holiday Inn Express was the most interesting thing to happen to a small circle of insecure teenagers lacking in passion and direction.
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| Participants at a local conference for furries greet each other in a hotel corridor in a scene from Rukus |
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| Two lonely furries stare out the window in a scene from Rukus |
The one bright light in their lives seems to have been a young man nicknamed Rukus who, as a child, was fascinated by dinosaurs and grew into an adolescent whose good looks and personality easily attracted the attention of others. Other than the furries attending the convention, there is very little sense of an adult presence in the lives of Rukus and his friends who, by contrast, make slackers seem rather industrious.
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| Rukus was a young gay man who committed suicide in 2008. |
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| Brett Hanover and Alanna Stewart in a scene from Rukus |
What struck me most about Hanover's film was how much social media has rejiggered parts of society into tribes with shared cultural interests ranging from furries to kink, from amateur filmmaking to animation and graphic novels. However, where many extended families develop bonds based on shared experiences (in real time), most of the relationships seen in Rukus are notable for an overwhelming sense of apathy, alienation, shallowness, and lack of motivation. Whatever glue is supposedly holding them together is pretty weak stuff. Instead of Six Characters in Search of an Author, Rukus is primarily about an aspiring filmmaker in search of an idea with some focus. For what it's worth, here's the trailer.
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I grew up in a family whose social circle consisted primarily of teachers and school librarians. As a result, the importance of unions in protecting jobs and procuring employee benefits was a no-brainer. By the time my father retired, unions were starting to come under attack. It was a shock, as a freelance writer, to learn that independent contractors were cheap, disposable, had little bargaining power, and no support structure to fall back on.Long before services like Lyft and Uber were launched, I was participating in the gig economy as a medical transcriptionist paid on a production basis by the word, line, or minute of recorded dictation. From 1999-2003, I wrote the "Transcription Trends" column in a healthcare information management trade journal entitled For The Record Magazine as the industry was experiencing the cost-cutting pain of outsourcing jobs to India and the Philippines while replacing skilled transcriptionists with speech recognition software.
That may be why certain elements of Dominique Morisseau's poignant drama, Skeleton Crew (which recently received its West Coast premiere from the Marin Theatre Company in a co-production with TheatreWorks Silicon Valley) hit home for me. I was familiar with a peculiar kind of intellectual camaraderie shared by workers with a highly specialized skill set who were constantly being undermined by managers who could not make it through a single shift transcribing dictation from muck-mouthed physicians.
On a cold October night in the early 1980s, I found myself in a guest room at the Dearborn Inn, preparing to tour the Henry Ford Museum for a freelance assignment. As I watched the evening news, I learned that October 30th was known locally as "Devil's Night" in the Detroit area. So far there were only about 300 homes on fire.
Morriseau's play is set in Detroit during 2008's terrifying financial crisis, a time when Michigan's auto industry was on the brink of extinction, abandoned factories were being stripped by thieves, and vulture capitalists like Mitt Romney were urging politicians to pull the plug on a dying sector of the American economy. (Thanks, Obama!)
It helps to understand of how closely the rise and fall of Detroit's turbulent economy has been linked to the automobile industry. According to Laura Brueckner's timeline:
- In 1973, the United Auto Workers union negotiated a "30-and-out at any age" contract for auto workers at the Ford, General Motors, and Chrysler plants which allowed someone to retire with full pension and health benefits after 30 years of employment.
- Thirty years later, Jon Clark launched Plant Closing News, a bimonthly newsletter which kept track of American factories that were shutting down (in the publication's first year there were 983 such closings).
- In July of 2013, the city of Detroit became the nation's largest municipality to file for Chapter 9 bankruptcy.
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| Margo Hall portrays a homeless lesbian line worker in Skeleton Crew (Photo by: Kevin Berne) |
While companies like Romney's Bain Capital were expert at downsizing payrolls so that their clients' employees were given the heave-ho and left to fend for themselves, many workers who had once been able to own their own homes and put their children through college suddenly found themselves saddled with debt, unable to make their mortgage payments, and on the brink of bankruptcy. Visitors to Detroit thought they had landed in the post-World War II ruins of a European city.
Working on a unit set created by Ed Haynes to resemble a broken down break room in an industrial plant, director Jade King Carroll focuses the audience's attention on four employees of a factory that, according to increasing rumors, is doomed to follow its neighbors into closure and bankruptcy.
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| Christian Thompson (Dez) and Margo Hall (Faye) in a scene from Skeleton Crew (Photo by: Kevin Berne) |
Faye (Margo Hall) is the oldest of three line workers. Having worked for the same employer for 29 years, she needs to last until the end of the calendar year in order to retire with full benefits. A cynial chain-smoking lesbian with a gambling habit, she has watched her horizons continue to shrink. After her son got married, he and his wife joined a homophobic church which did not think a lesbian grandmother would be a good influence on their newborn child. In addition to losing her family, Faye's lover died, she lost her home because she couldn't keep up with the mortgage payments to the bank, she's secretly battling cancer, and has recently been forced to live out of her car.
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| Tristan Cunningham portrays the pregnant Shanita in Skeleton Crew (Photo by Kevin Berne) |
Shanita (Tristan Cunningham) is a single woman who is well into her first pregnancy. Proud of her skills and her ability to work as hard as any man on the assembly line, she is counting on her union benefits to help support her once the baby is born.
Dez (Christian Thompson) is an able-bodied young man who has been careful to compartmentalize various parts of his life. He rarely lets on about his dreams to have his own auto repair shop and secretly carries a gun in his backpack. While he tries to act tough in front of Faye and Shanita, his bark is much less than his bite. Despite constant attempts to flirt with Shanita or sass Faye, he respects both women.
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| Margo Hall (Faye), Lance Gardner (Reggie), and Christian Thompson (Dez) in a scene from Skeleton Crew (Photo by: Kevin Berne) |
The fourth employee is Reggie (Lance Gardner), a unit manager who finds himself under increasing psychological pressure at home and at work. Constantly posting signs that warn employees of company regulations, he is trying to straddle the cultural gap between management and employees (his mother used to work on one of the assembly lines he now supervises).
As a child, Reggie never expected that he would one day be able to buy a house and raise a child. But with financial responsibilities nagging at him and the knowledge that the factory's future is grim, he is struggling to find ways to keep Faye, Shanita, and Dez (as well as the workers on other production lines) employed. Reggie's extended family poses another conflict of interest. As a child, he grew up visiting Faye and her family without understanding that his mother and Faye were secretly lovers.
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| Lance Gardner portrays the line supervisor, Reggie, in Skeleton Crew (Photo by: Kevin Berne) |
A native of Detroit, Morriseau has written a Detroit-based trilogy (Skeleton Crew, Paradise Baby, and Detroit '67) as well as crafting the libretto for Ain't Too Proud: The Life and Times of The Temptations. While it may take audiences a while to settle into the dialect of Skeleton Crew's ensemble (I had some trouble tuning my ears to their speech), each character's conflicts, doubts, and growing fears become crystal clear as the evening progresses.
For those who have grown accustomed to their faces, it's dangerously easy to take the superb work of Tristan Cunningham and Margo Hall for granted. Both actors shine as two hard-working factory women facing physical challenges (pregnancy and menopause) that their male colleagues can't even comprehend. Christian Thompson's portrayal of Dez ranges from a simmering hothead to a stubborn young man determined to keep his secrets close to his chest. Late in the evening, Lance Gardner explodes during a confrontation with Margo Hall's Faye which shocks and humbles Reggie, leading him down a path toward resolution and redemption. It's a beautifully crafted showdown which has been impressively staged by Jade King Carroll.
Performances of Skeleton Crew continue through February 18 at the Marin Theatre Company (click here for tickets). Here's the trailer:
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