The white-hot rage and caustic bitterness against de-industrialization, unemployment, minorities, and immigrants, not to mention races and religions other than white and Christian, may have escalated in the Trump administration, but it didn’t start in 2016.
As Lynn Nottage’s brutal, brilliant sucker punch of a Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Sweat, points out, America’s current state of intolerance and white entitlement began long before. In Sweat, she identifies our troubles as roiling and festering between 2000 and 2008, from the beginning of the end of American factory workers, through the George Bush years to the Great Recession of 2006 and its pitiless fallout.
Nottage suggests in her far-reaching, thematically and emotionally ruthless drama that racism and xenophobia has been knitted into the fabric of our nation’s history since its scrappy beginnings. Everyman Theatre, under the lucid direction of Vincent M. Lancisi, brings all of Nottage’s themes, aspirations and bruisingly real characters to life in a production that is at once hard to watch and impossible to look away from.
It’s like an old wound newly opened, throbbing with fresh blood, pain and honeycombs of scar tissue. The play depicts the death of the American way and the corrosion of the Rust Belt, but pulses with life even when its characters seem to be constantly at the receiving end of a raw deal.
Sweat is constructed like a police procedural or mystery, going back and forth in time as we try to piece together what happened and how the characters got the way they are. The play opens in 2008, as two young men, former best friends Chris (Vaughn Ryan Midder) and Jason (Matthew Alan Ward), talk separately with their parole officer (Jason B. McIntosh, grounded and sure in a small but pivotal role) about their recent release from jail and how they’re coping—Chris subdued and relying on faith; Jason jittery and trying to find his place with a face covered in white supremacy tattoos.[ezcol_1third]
——–
Sweat
closes November 25, 2018
Details and tickets
——–[/ezcol_1third]
The drama—with glints of earthy humor—mostly takes place in a working-class bar in Redding, PA, rendered in endearingly grubby detail by set designer Daniel Ettinger, who has the details nailed right down to the Yuengling beer on tap, the Jaegermeister bottle always ready for shots, and the Philly sports team banners. Dusty-mote lighting by Harold F. Burgess II and projections of national and local headlines further anchor the audience in the mise-en-scene.
The boozy denizens of Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh would feel right at home at this bar, presided over by the philosophical barkeep Stan (Kurt Rhoads, unassuming and shatteringly so), a factory man injured on the job but still keeping tabs on his former employer and fellow workers. There’s even a nod to an O’Neill-like character in the guise of Brucie (a chillingly prescient Jaben Early), a ghostly presence, a haunting harbinger of what lies ahead for the factory workers.
Except nobody in this bar has any pipe dream beyond maybe one day being able to afford a cruise.
They drink to forget their grueling shifts on the line, where working with hangovers and bad backs are part of the job. Some more than others—Jessie (played by roughness and fragility by Megan Anderson), an ex-flower child, is often passed out in the corner, her slumped head surrounded by a coronet of empty gimlet glasses.
This is the kind of place where generations of union factory workers gather each work day—complaining about clueless management and dangerously malfunctioning machinery but still fiercely proud to be a worker standing on the line no matter what. The money they make lines their pockets (and well) but it also identifies them, shapes them, grinds away at their autonomy until they can see no possibilities beyond the noise, the dirt, the repetitive work that was good enough for their parents and grandparents who could afford a house and later securely retire with a guaranteed pension.
[adsanity_rotating align=”aligncenter” time=”10″ group_id=”1455″ /]
Two characters, Cynthia (Dawn Ursula, strong and still in her truth) and her introspective son Chris (Midder grippingly portrays the reality of lost chances) see the writing on the wall and aspire to a life off the line—management for Cynthia, college for Chris. On the other hand, his longtime friend Jason (Ward, waggish and terrifyingly young) is only concerned with getting drunk and getting a Harley.
Cynthia’s ambitions, in particular, cause friction among her friends and co-workers, especially after she’s promoted and trades in her work boots for black pumps. Her best friend Tracey (Deborah Hazlett, brazenly tough and cruel in the role) goes on the offense—and offensive—telling anyone who will listen that Cynthia only got the job to fill a minority quota.
Tracey’s vituperation doesn’t stop there. The bitterness spews over onto everyone, including bar-back Oscar (the excellent Alejandro Ruiz), an American-born Colombian who is willing to cross the picket line if it means better wages and a hand-up in life.
During a long, hot summer fueled by factory lockouts and strikes, Tracey’s privilege rises to the fore—she and her family got here first, damn it, and she and her fellow white people deserve to be on top, even if it means trampling and clamping down on “the others.”
The word “worker” is said with such swelling pride by the characters in Sweat—it’s who they are, it’s how America was built, by calloused hands. Later in the play, “worker” becomes a dirty word, suggesting resignation or defeat, and to hear that change in meaning is heartbreaking.
Sweat is more than an elegy to lost industry and work in America. It’s an important play that with steely resolve depicts the eroding of values, the beginning of our turning away from our country’s founding principles of unity and strength in commonality, of tolerance and acceptance, in favor of separatism, isolation and fear. Oh, how the mighty have fallen.
Sweat by Lynn Nottage . Director: Vincent M. Lancisi. Featuring: Megan Anderson, Jaben Early, Deborah Hazlett, Jason B. McIntosh, Vaughn Ryan Midder, Kurt Rhoads, Alejandro Ruiz, Dawn Ursula, Matthew Alan Ward. Set Design: Daniel Ettinger. Lighting Design: Harold F. Burgess II. Costume Design: David Burdick. Sound Design: C Andrew Mayer. Fight Choreography: Lewis Shaw. Dramaturgy: Lindsey R. Barr. Stage Manager: Amanda M. Hall.Produced by Everyman Theatre . Reviewed by Jayne Blanchard.
