Sweat

Lynn Nottage is the first woman to win two Pulitzer Prizes for Drama. Her first win was for Ruined, which was set in the Congo. The setting couldn't be more different in Sweat, which is Reading, Pennsylvania. But there are certain similarities--they are both about characters who come to a certain desperation.

Sweat bounces between two time periods: 2000 and 2008. In the later year, we are introduced to two ex-cons who are out on parole. Jason is white, with racist tattoos on his face. Chris is black, once his good friend. They committed a crime together, but we won't know what it is until the end of the play.

In the year 2000, the action takes place in a bar, and all the regulars work at a factory. The bartender, Stan, was injured on the job, but the others, both black and white, mix easily due to their common place of employment. Cynthia, a middle-aged black woman, is trying to get a promotion to management. Her white friend, Tracey, also tries for it, but Cynthia gets it. When the company tries to restructure the workers' contracts, Cynthia finds herself in a bind--she wants to help her friends, but she has a job to do.

Sweat, which I suppose is named for the liquid expended working on a factory floor without air conditioning (the corporate office is cool) is a fine examination of the plight of the blue collar workers in the U.S. They are in a union, and when asked to take a sixty-percent pay cut, they go out on strike. Scabs are hired, including the bus boy at the bar, Oscar, a Colombian (this, as any savvy play-reader will predict, leads to trouble).

As with Ruined, Nottage does not display anything experimental. The plot is fairly simple--you know that the end will reveal the men's crime and that Oscar will be involved. But what Nottage does well here is depicting the world of the worker. I find it interesting that workers who are on strike would continue to buy drinks (one of the characters, Jessie, is clearly an alcoholic), and since I don't hang out in bars I don't know if that's how people talk in them--it seemed a little too stagey.

The characters, though, are very vividly drawn. The aforementioned Jessie, who is mostly seen passed out, like a character in The Iceman Cometh, has enough lucidity to express a long-held desire: "I wish . . . I had gotten to see the world. You know, left Berks, if only for a year. That’s what I regret. Not
the work, I regret the fact that for a little while it seemed like, I don’t know, there was possibility. I think about that Jessie on the other side of the world and what she woulda seen."

Stan, ruminating on instead of battling a company, maybe it would be best to just pack up and leave, says: "Sometimes I think we forget that we’re meant to pick up and go when the well runs dry. Our
ancestors knew that."

Since I'm not close to New York any more I didn't get to see this play, and perhaps seeing it would have made it more convincing. But the printed version does include the news of the day before each scene. It's not clear whether that is projected on a screen in the acted version.