Skeleton Crew comes to us like a faint pulse just arriving from a distant star that exploded thousands of years in the past. It’s set at an automobile-parts factory in 2008. That was a few eons ago in the sociopolitical conversation. Today we’re much too sophisticated to worry about the economic pressures on blue-collar workers. Instead, all anyone engaged in the public diagnosing of our ills talks about is racism, fascism, the coming civil war, Trumpism, the incipient overthrow of democracy, and more racism. (Lately joined by covid and its attendant neuroses.)

Written by Dominique Morisseau, Skeleton Crew is one of seven plays by black playwrights to debut on Broadway in the 2021–22 season, but it isn’t actually new, having been developed eight years ago, then staged off-Broadway at the Atlantic Theater Company in 2016.

Back then, B.T. (Before Trump), issues of economic insecurity were heavy on the minds of many public intellectuals. A.T., however, working-class concerns became associated with Trump and were therefore deemed racist. You might as well write sympathetically about German workers in 1937. Discussion of issues facing black Americans has moved on from class and into the realm of boutique academic squabbles about abstractions such as Critical Race Theory and the supposed invisible scars of 1619.

So what are today’s black-oriented plays about? Two existential hobos standing on a street corner afraid to budge lest they be gunned down by racist police (Pass Over), interracial couples