At the Public
Theater in New York City
Sweat: An honest depiction of the American working class
By Fred Mazelis
30 December 2016
Lynn Nottage’s Sweat is
an unusual and rewarding play, depicting social reality not often seen in the
American theater. Set in the decaying industrial city of Reading, Pennsylvania,
the work shows, through the lives of its eight major characters, what decades
of concessions, deindustrialization and plant shutdowns have done to the living
standards and social conditions--and texture of existence--of tens of millions
of workers and their families.
The play, directed by Kate Whoriskey,
has just finished a successful two-month run at New York City’s Public Theater,
and is headed to Broadway in the spring. The same writer-director team was
responsible for Ruined,
which appeared off-Broadway in 2009 and is set in the Congo during the long
civil war there. Like Ruined, Sweat is the product of lengthy research.
Nottage and a team of assistants spent more than two years interviewing about
100 people in Reading.
Nottage explained, in a recent
interview in the Los Angeles
Times, that she seeks to focus attention on “spaces that are
under-illuminated.” She was drawn to Reading after hearing that the city of
some 88,000, the fifth-largest in the state of Pennsylvania and only about 125
miles west of New York City, was the poorest city in the United States,
according to 2010 census figures.
Reading, with 41.3 percent of its residents
officially living in
poverty, ranked highest
among US cities with more than 65,000
people below the
poverty line. However, it is
only the first among near-equals. Its history
and
current economic state are not
fundamentally different from those of many
small
and larger cities across the US.
The list of factories that have closed or drastically
reduced
operations in Reading in recent years is a
long one. It includes the Hershey
Company, AT&T,
Lucent Technologies, the Dana Corporation and
many others.
The state of Pennsylvania, with a
current population of about 12.8 million,
lost
314,000 manufacturing jobs between 1998 and 2013.
While the characters and story line of Sweat are
fictional, they are the product of the intensive research and interviews
conducted by Nottage. The play is situated within a definite time and place,
the action framed by exact dates that introduce, via supertitles, the various
scenes in the narrative.
Much of the action is set in the year 2000. A brief prologue,
however, takes place in 2008. A parole officer is interviewing two young men,
Jason and Chris, who have just been released from prison for a crime which is
not further explained at that point.
The play then proceeds to explore the background, leading up to
events eight years earlier that changed the lives of these and the other
characters.
After the introduction of Jason and Chris, the next scene flashes
back eight years to a neighborhood bar, where we meet the other characters.
They include Tracey and Cynthia, friends and co-workers at a local steel-tubing
factory and the mothers of Jason and Chris, respectively; Jessie, another
co-worker of theirs; Stan, the local bartender and a veteran worker at the same
plant, who left after being injured on the job; Oscar, Stan’s helper and
assistant at the bar, an immigrant from Colombia; and Brucie, the estranged
husband of Cynthia, who, in the course of a 93-week lockout, succumbed to
despair and to drugs.
The action unfolds over a period of several months. The atmosphere
is one of increasing fear and helplessness in the face of the ever-present and
mounting threat of a plant shutdown and job losses. At one point Tracey and
Cynthia discuss the possibility of applying for a supervisory position in the plant.
They both wind up applying, and Cynthia gets the job. Tension continues to grow
as the threat of a lockout looms on August 4, 2000. The workers are replaced by
scabs. Over the next three months the stresses expand to the boiling point.
November 3, 2000 is the fateful day that charts the course of the next eight
years for these characters.
The final scene, set on October 18,
2008 and including Chris, Jason, Stan and Oscar, brings the various strands of
the story together in a grim, unsentimental and vaguely humanist conclusion. Sweat could
hardly be more appropriate, in a presidential election year in which the cry of
anger and desperation was heard, from voters and non-voters alike.
Lynn Nottage’s play is welcome for its honest depiction of life in
Reading and, by extension, life for the majority of workers in the US and other
advanced capitalist countries. The cast was excellent in every respect,
including Will Pullen as Jason, Khris Davis as Chris, Carlo Albán as Oscar,
Michelle Wilson as Cynthia, James Colby as Stan, Johanna Day as Tracey, Miriam
Shor as Jessie and John Earl Jelks as Brucie. The play, which was
co-commissioned by the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and the Arena Stage in
Washington DC, came to New York after appearing in Oregon and Washington.
One of the most positive elements of the play is its generally
truthful accounting of the relationship between race and class in American
society today. At a time when the theater--and cultural dialogue as a whole--is
almost entirely dominated by talk of “white society,” “white privilege” and the
allegedly unbridgeable gap between the races, Nottage shows that workers of
different races and nationalities face the same conditions and the same
challenges.
This is not to say that racial and ethnic tensions are ignored in
the play. They are present, but they are depicted in a realistic and almost
matter-of-fact manner. What emerges from the dialogue and the actual story of
these workers and their families is how similar they all are, beneath the
surface of their skin color. The city of Reading, according to latest figures,
is about 48 percent white and 14 percent African American. More than half the
population is Hispanic.
Tracey, who is white, at one point suggests that her
African-American friend Cynthia obtained her management job because she was
black. Tracey and Jessie do not trust Cynthia, and understandably suspect she
is withholding information from them, as rumors swirl of equipment being moved
out of the factory in expectation of a plant closure.
Brucie discusses racial divisions, including the struggle his own
father had to get a job in the factory when, having picked “his last bale of
cotton,” he came north in 1952 as part of the “Great Migration.”
Jason, meanwhile, is turning angry and bitter, while his friend
Chris has more hopes for the future, and hopes to return to school. Oscar, the
immigrant, adds another element to the story of the working class in 21st
century America.
What emerges in the end is that, despite changes in the
composition of the working class, the basic social issues remain.
Amidst the tensions between them, all of the characters express,
in one fashion or another, their disgust with the existing system and its
political representatives. In one scene, in March 2000, listening to discussion
of the upcoming presidential election, the appearance of George W. Bush on
television is met with general contempt. In August of that year, one character
says that after “watching these candidates talking bullshit, I decided I’m not
voting.” “Amen to that” is the reaction.
When the workers are forced to accept a 60 percent pay cut, they
blame it on NAFTA (the North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement passed during the
Bill Clinton administration). The union offers a bag of groceries, comments one
of the workers. “It’s fuckin’ humiliating,” says Jason about the lockout. “They
won’t let me clean out my locker.”
Nottage makes a distinction between the
black and white workers she met in Reading that contains a grain of truth if
properly understood. The playwright, who is black, told the LA Times that “The language they [white
workers] were using sounded very familiar to me, language that for 100 years or
more African Americans have been using to describe our circumstances. ‘We feel
marginalized,’ ‘We feel unheard.’ ‘We feel disenfranchised’ … I felt for the
first time we all shared a narrative.”
Nottage is wrong to suggest that a
“shared narrative” has just emerged, although perhaps she means that she hasn’t
felt it previously. Despite the history of slavery, Jim Crow and pervasive
racism in the century following the Civil War, there are numerous of instances
of common struggle, from the days of the IWW to the organizing struggles of the
1930s and the battles for civil rights in the 1960s. Objectively, there is one
working class in the US. But Nottage is right when she suggests that the
artificial divisions that have been used to pit white and black workers against
one another are being fatally undermined by the current crisis of the profit
system. In that sense the “shared narrative” is a weapon against all those who
seek to divide workers along racial lines. Sweat is not without weaknesses. There is
much that is gripping and realistic, but, as in Ruined, the playwright stops well short
of fully probing and exploring the roots of economic and social disaster. This
weakens the overall effort.
To the extent the play communicates the desperation facing the
working class, that there seems to be no way out of their dilemma through the
established institutions, including the Democratic Party and the trade unions,
it poses some crucial questions.
The play ends with a brief and understated plea for empathy and
human connection. This is an increasingly common refrain from a section of the
liberal middle class. The workers are portrayed simply as victims.
“Where do we go from here?” says Nottage in the abovementioned
interview. “All of us are in pain. All of us feel a certain level of trauma.
Are we going to remain divided? Or are we going to try to come together and
heal?”
Who is going to come together and for
what purpose? At this moment, of course, there are those who call for a “coming
together” to rescue the Democratic Party after its latest electoral disaster.
There are others who recognize the need for uniting the working class against
the system that is responsible for the conditions depicted in Sweat. This is not the message of Sweat, although it is one conclusion
that could be drawn from the suffering depicted on stage.
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