Sweat
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Cititour.com Review
Donald Trump turned Pennsylvania Republican red for the first time since 1988 in the 2016 election. To understand how he won this Rust Belt state by less than 50,000 votes, look at Sweat, the timeliest and most dynamic play to hit Broadway this season. Although set in the recent past (2000 and 2008), Lynn Nottage’s piercing look into the lives of blue-collar workers in Reading, Pennsylvania, post-NAFTA, is a cry from working-class America.
It opens in the later year, with recently released prisoners Jason (Will Pullen) and Chris (Khris Davis) separately talking to their parole officer (Lance Coadie Williams). But how they ended up behind bars isn’t revealed until later. In the next scene, set in 2000, the young men are working at a factory called Olstead’s with their mothers. Jason’s mom, the brassy Tracey (Johanna Day), and Chris’s, Cynthia (Michelle Wilson), are longtime friends whose relationship is strained when Cynthia leaves the factory for an office job.
Soon after, their world crumbles. The steady employment and solid paycheck they’ve come to count on disappears when workers reject pay cut and get embroiled in a strike. Although Sweat is a play about the workplace, none of it takes place on the job. Most of the scenes are set in the bar run by Stan (James Colby), a former factory worker who left after being injured on the job. As the strikes persists, the good-humored atmosphere turns explosive. Race becomes a divisive factor for Cynthia and Tracey (who thinks her friend got promoted because she’s black), and when Oscar (Carlo Alban), a Latino American who helps Stan at the bar, takes a temp job at the factory, tensions boil over.
None of the characters, who also include Tracey and Cynthia’s colleague Jessie (Alison Wright) and Cynthia’s estranged and addicted husband Brucie (John Earl Jelks), are overtly political, yet politics vastly impacts their lives. Sweat actually premiered at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in 2015, before criticism of NAFTA’s cost to American jobs became a heated campaign issue in the election. On the heels of Trump’s promise to renegotiate the trade deal, it’s not hard to imagine these men and women casting ballots for him.
Nottage and director Kate Whoriskey, who collaborated on Ruined, the playwright’s Pulitzer Prize-winning work about women who endured sexual violence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, ensure that these flawed characters have depth and integrity.
Whoriskey’s production pulses with tension, especially as it reaches its powerful climax. The outstanding cast — Day and Davis are standouts — shift smoothly from frivolity to fury. In the end Sweat emphasizes the importance of looking out for each other when times are hard, and of the harsh consequences when rage gets the better of us.
- Diane Snyder
(Review #2)
Timing, as they say, is everything, and there can be little doubt that the superb African-American playwright Lynn Nottage is making her way overdue Broadway debut with “Sweat,” now at Studio 54, because its super-authentic portrait of disenfranchised working-class Pennsylvanians in 2000 provides a much-needed lesson (especially to jaded New Yorkers) of why certain people voted for Donald Trump in our last Presidential election.
But “Sweat” (which premiered last summer at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and then moved to a brief run last fall at the Public Theatre) would be an incredibly worthy addition to any Broadway season. Meticulously researched and populated with both realistic dialogue and true-to-life characters, it’s no mere political meditation, but a gripping tale of friendships gone wrong and societal prejudice run amok. And as stunningly staged by Kate Whoriskey and enacted by a flawless ensemble, it’s a valuable reminder (to producers and audiences alike) that star-driven vehicles need not be the Great White Way’s only worthy fare.
For better (and I think worse), Nottage sets up the play in 2008, with two former best friends, the strong yet tender African-American Chris (a superb Krhis Davis) and the angry yet vulnerable Jason (an excellent Will Pullen) being interrogated by the same cop (Lance Coadie Williams), still trying to find out what happened to cause the young men to end up in jail for eight years. (The “what-happened” element of the plot tends to distract at times from what follows)
Soon enough, though, we’re back in 2000, in a Reading, Pennsylvania bar (brilliantly designed by John Lee Beatty). It’s managed by the garrulous Stan (a convincing James Colby) and populated all-too frequently by those young men and their mothers, lifelong best friends and fellow factory workers Cynthia (a riveting Michelle Wilson) and Tracey (the stunning Johanna Day), a hard-bitten widow whose family has worked in the town’s steel mills for three generations.
The local industry is far from booming thanks in part to the passage of NAFTA – Cynthia’s husband Brucie (the remarkable John Earl Jelks) has been locked out of his mill for nearly two years – and things go from bad to worse in short order. Even after Cynthia gets promoted to management, a fact Tracey ultimately ascribes to a kind of affirmative action, she ultimately must lock out Tracey, fellow bestie Jessie (a very fine Allison Wright) along with both boys when their mill decides to ship business to Mexico in order to save money.
The breaking point, unsurprisingly, is when the mill finds “temporary workers” among the town’s even lower-classes such as Oscar (the sublime Carlo Alban), a hard-working Hispanic young man who is the bar’s bus boy. Meanwhile, George W. Bush blabbers on the bar’s TV about bailing out Wall Street, as oblivious and unconcerned about the folks in Reading as they must have been about Lehman Brothers bankers jumping from the rooftops.
Nottage, the author of “Ruined” and “Intimate Apparel,” has a glorious way with language; I counted at least two truly memorable monologues. Her one major dramaturgical flaw here is not just the overwhelming amount of exposition in the play, but how clumsily it sometimes gets handled. (Stan too often feels like a Greek chorus, making sure we hear things that we, and everyone else in the bar, already knows.)
But ultimately, Nottage succeeds in her mission. We hear a side of the larger American story that has to be told; how the promise of “good American jobs” (whether it can ever be fulfilled) could prove to be the one thing to get perpetually disgusted voters to actually pull a Presidential lever, and how when the economy turns against some of us, any “minority” group can easily turn into the despised “other.” There are so many good reasons to see “Sweat,” but none moreso than to truly remind us that those who don’t learn from history truly are unquestionably doomed to repeat it.
- Brian Scott Lipton
Visit the Site
http://sweatbroadway.com
Cast
Carlo Albán, James Colby, Khris Davis, Johanna Day, John Earl Jelks, Will Pullen, Lance Coadie Williams, Michelle Wilson, Alison Wright
Open/Close Dates
Opening 3/26/2017
Closing 6/25/2017
Preview Open/ Preview Close Dates
Preview Opening 3/4/2018
Closing Open-ended
Box Office
212-239-6200
Theatre Info
Studio 54
254 West 54th Street
New York, NY 10019
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