"Last Shift," the Foundry Stage Company's commissioned play about the wave of factory closures that gutted Bellwater's manufacturing base in the early 2000s, opened Friday night at The Regal Theatre to a sold-out house that included dozens of former plant workers who lived through the events the script portrays.
“Last Shift,” written by Bellwater native Curtis Whitlow and directed by Foundry Stage Company artistic director Marisol Fennimore, follows three generations of a fictionalized Foundry Row family across the final week before a fastener plant permanently closes its doors. The 100-minute production, staged with a single rotating set representing both the plant floor and the family’s kitchen table, sold out its 340-seat run at The Regal Theatre within four days of tickets going on sale, according to the company’s box office.
Whitlow, who has spent much of his career writing for theaters outside Bellwater, said the play draws directly on his father’s layoff from a real Foundry Row plant when Whitlow was twelve. “I changed the names and I compressed twenty years into one week for the sake of the stage, but the argument at that kitchen table in the second act is almost word for word something I heard as a kid,” Whitlow said. “I didn’t think I’d ever be able to put it in front of an audience in this city and have them recognize it.”
An audience that lived it
Fennimore said roughly a third of opening night’s audience came through group sales arranged with union locals and neighborhood associations in Cedar Hollow and Lowertown, a deliberate outreach effort tied to the season’s local focus. Grant Yeboah, who plays the family’s eldest son in the production, said that outreach changed the emotional temperature of the room in ways he hadn’t anticipated from rehearsal.
“There’s a line in the second act where my character says the plant owes his father nothing because it never promised him anything, and Friday night I heard someone in the third row say ‘that’s not true’ out loud,” Yeboah said. “You don’t get that reaction from an audience that’s watching history. You get that from an audience that’s still arguing with it.”
I worked the floor at a plant just like the one in that play for nineteen years before it closed. Watching it on a stage instead of living it in a break room was harder than I expected, and I mean that as the highest compliment I know how to give.
Denny Kowalski, owner, Mill Street Diner
A partnership with the museum
The production is paired with a series of post-show talkbacks at the Bellwater Museum of Art’s new Ironworks Wing, where curator Priscilla Adeyemi has arranged for several former factory workers whose oral histories are archived in the gallery to speak alongside the cast after select performances. Adeyemi said the partnership emerged naturally once she saw an early read-through of Whitlow’s script.
“The wing exists so this history doesn’t just sit behind glass,” Adeyemi said. “Having people watch the play and then walk two blocks to hear the real version from someone who lived it, and sometimes disagreed with how the play told it, is exactly the kind of living conversation we built that gallery for.”
Not every review of the production has been uncomplicated. A handful of audience members interviewed after Friday’s show said they found the play’s ending, in which the family’s youngest daughter leaves for a biotech job in Foundry Row, too tidy a resolution for the decades of hardship the rest of the script portrays. Whitlow said he has heard the criticism before, including from his own sister.
Fennimore, who directed the production alongside her season-long duties as artistic director, said staging a single rotating set to represent both the plant floor and the family kitchen required more technical rehearsal time than any Foundry Stage production in recent memory. The set, built in-house rather than rented from a touring package, uses a single hydraulic turntable to shift between the two spaces in full view of the audience during several key transitions.
“We wanted the audience to physically watch the plant floor become the kitchen table, because that’s the whole argument of the play,” Fennimore said. “The same forces that closed one space are the ones sitting at the other one arguing about what happens next. If the audience can see that in the machinery of the set itself, they don’t need us to explain it in dialogue.”
- “Last Shift” runs six weeks at The Regal Theatre, with post-show talkbacks scheduled every other Sunday.
- The Bellwater Museum of Art is hosting several talkback events pairing cast members with former factory workers.
- The Foundry Stage Company says advance sales for the run have already exceeded the company’s projections for the season.
“I didn’t write the ending to make anyone feel better,” Whitlow said. “I wrote it because that’s what actually happened to people in my own family, some of them landed on their feet in the new economy and some of them never did, and I didn’t think it was my job to pretend the second group doesn’t exist just to make the first group’s story feel earned.”
Fennimore said the company will decide within weeks of the run’s close whether “Last Shift” will be extended or submitted for consideration at regional theater festivals, a decision she said will hinge as much on continued ticket demand as on reviews. “This is the play that tells us whether the whole experiment of this season works,” she said. “So far, the room is telling us something we didn’t necessarily expect it to.”