Sweat
This gritty, evocative Pulitzer Prize winning play is set at a time during the second Bush Administration when working class Americans are about to have their lives irrevocably disrupted.
The main setting is a bar where close-knit employees meet to drink, talk, party and fight. Inspired by the plight of steel workers in Pennsylvania, the audience hears that the factory is hard work, leaving the women after several decades on the floor with “sagging titties” and “bunions”.
It is respectably paid, and the workers plan on staying until their retirement with good benefits. The winds of change are coming as businesses are on the move to Mexico, accelerating the expansion of the ‘rust belt’ which has featured so prominently in recent US elections.
Into this whirlwind of change come a group of gutsy and believable characters. The play opens with two young men Jason (James Fraser) and Chris (Tinashe Mangwana) being interviewed by a detention officer Evan (Markus Hamilton).
Soon the play flashes back to when Chris is considering training to become a teacher, but is lobbied by Jason to stay with him in the factory.
Their mothers have powerful personalities. Tracey (Lisa McCune) is a firebrand who revels in the family tradition of making things with their hands. Cynthia (Paula Arundell) yearns for the opportunity of leaving the shop floor to become a manager.
Into the mix are thrown the bar manager Stan (Yure Covich), recent immigrant Oscar (Gabriel Avarado) trying to feed his family and worker Jessie (Deborah Galanos).
The playwright Lynn Nottage creates the powder keg then lights the fuse. An industrial fight with an old-fashioned picket line divides loyalties.
Many lyrical lines flow from the characters’ lips. The poignant ones include “Sometimes I think we forget that we’re meant to pick and up when the well runs dry” and “Most folks think it's the guilt or rage that destroys us in the end, but I know from experience that it's shame that eats us away until we disappear.”
The strong acting ensemble takes the audience on a powerful journey to the searing and surprising ending. Written a few years before the election of Donald Trump, Nottage taps into the rage which saw him elected.
In a note in the program she writes “I showed up and listened.”
David Spicer
Photographer: Prudence Upton
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