No smokin' but Rock'N' Roll, hail Brutus.
Sweat is a 2015 play by American playwright Lynn Nottage.
It won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
The play premiered at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in 2015; it was produced Off-Broadway in 2016 and on Broadway in 2017. The play is centered on the working class of Reading, Pennsylvania.
The Plot:
The play portrays a meeting between a parole officer and two ex-convicts, and three women who were childhood friends and had worked in the same factory.
The action takes place in a fictional bar in Reading, Pennsylvania.
The plot consists of many different characters. There are a group of friends that work for the steel factory, named Tracy, Cynthia and Jessie. Tracy is a middle-aged white woman. She loves to hang out at the bar with her friends and she has a gruff kind of humor. She cannot stand the way Reading has been changing over the years.
Her friend Cynthia is a black woman who also loves to hang out with her friends at the bar and is a hardworking woman in the factory. She is on and off with her husband, Brucie, who is addicted to drugs.
During the play, Cynthia applies for a managing job at the plant which causes some problems. Jessie, another worker at the factory, is not so happy with how her life has turned out and has some problems with alcohol abuse. This is shown in many of the bar scenes. The bartender in the play is Stan. He used to work at the plant but he was injured in a factory accident. Oscar, the busboy at the bar, is Colombian and is not acknowledged often by the people who go there.
Some characters use racial slurs towards Latinos and show him that he isn't welcome in the Olstead factory. Jason is a white man who is Tracey's son. His best friend is Chris, Cynthia’s son. They both work at the factory and worry that they will be laid off. They both are arrested for assault and are released eight years later. These are only the main characters. There are other minor characters in the plot of the play.
Nottage shifts in time, switching scenes and showing events of eight years earlier. Variety quotes the bartender, Stan, as warning the other characters that "You could wake up tomorrow and all your jobs are in Mexico", to which the characters respond with lethargy and disbelief. Variety described Nottage as going into "the heart of working-class America".
Reviews of the play have described the characters as representing blue-collar workers who voted in Donald Trump as president.
The play also examines the disintegration of a friendship, after two of the women – one white, one black – apply for the same management job. The latter character gets the position, but soon the company moves jobs to Mexico. The trade union goes on strike, and company management locks out the workers. The management/worker diviion begins to separate the friends, and racial tensions separate them further.
Directed by Richard Scharine
December 2017 Salt Lake City
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