Theater: Lynn Nottage’s Sweat probes the Trump voter

Sweat, Lynn Nottage’s 2015 play about struggling factory workers in Reading, PA, was prescient in predicting all the recent post-election conversation about the woes of the working class. Given its topicality, it was therefore not surprising that the original off-Broadway play returned this year for an on-Broadway run. Nottage was known to me for Ruined, a harrowing account of rape in the Congo. This play did not quite duplicate the unyielding intensity of the earlier effort, and often felt like she was observing and analyzing the characters, rather than truly being one with them as in Ruined. Sweat tells the story of a group of mixed race friends and family who work at a local tooling plant and hang out at a local bar to bond, fight, gossip, and escape their exhausting, humdrum, but well-paying factory jobs. The tragic plot is driven by both the impending downsizing of the factory and the rise of one of the friends into junior management. I wish I had seen Sweat before the election, as it would have given me much more to speculate on and analyze. As it is, most of the topics ably raised in the play have been thoroughly written about in post-election coverage: anti-immigrant sentiment, lack of job training, closing of factories, the juxtaposition of interracial friendship with older prejudice and entitlement, substance abuse, and imprisonment of young men. For example, a beleaguered fired worker says she is not joining the union’s job retraining class since “I never liked school”. That this catalog of topics of our day did not turn into a checklist, a sermon, or melodrama shows the talent of the playwright. She built good flow, complexity and moral uncertainty into her plot—a young Latino loathed for his crossing a picket line ends up as perhaps the most successful and sympathetic character, e.g. The chilling dialogue in which he is grouped by strikers with the “immigrants taking our jobs” even though he was born in the USA was telling and echoed the disgraceful dialogue of the last election.

Yet I often did not feel engaged with these characters. While complex, and neither overly sympathetic nor monstrous, they somehow did not feel entirely real to me, more types than living breathing characters. Good and evil, warmth and malice were distributed almost too equally among the characters, regardless of their race, a sort of diversity enforcement for behavior and morality. More asymmetry would have been both more realistic and dramatic, and made them seem less studied. The play lacked some of the impact of working class dramas like Death of a Salesman, or even TV’s All in the Family, where a flawed character is given depth and warmth so we can truly buy into his world and his tragedy. In Eugene O’Neill’s symbolist The Hairy Ape, dockworkers are shown as caged animals gawked at by the upper classes—I felt uneasily that way as an audience member here, distanced from the drama rather than a part of it. Nottage is to be congratulated for her well-crafted, on-spot analysis of the current American tragedy, but I do not think the play will survive it’s era-specific themes.