De-industrial rage
Pulitzer-winning look at factory closings hits close to home in Ontario — and its creator says the play came from a place of ‘immense anger’
When Lynn Nottage’s Pulitzer Prizewinning play “Sweat,” a contemporary drama between laid-off factory workers in rural America, had a run in Washington, in January 2016, the Washington Post theatre critic Peter Marks thought it had all been done before.
“Plot-wise, it’s rather unremarkable, only a minor variation on an American labour story that has been dramatized thoroughly over the decades, in everything from the works of Arthur Miller to the movie ‘Norma Rae,’ ” he wrote.
It’s almost laughable now. Of course, Marks didn’t know then that later that same year, the 2016 presidential election would prove the relevance of Nottage’s play, which she developed by interviewing the real residents of Reading, Pa., (which the Census Bureau called, at the time, the poorest U.S. city of its size, devastated by automation and factory closings) over two-and-ahalf years.
Labour issues, true, have provided the inspiration for important pieces of theatre and film and art in the past; but “Sweat” was, and is, an articulation of a very modern sense of alienation, competition, and existential pain born out of economic precarity.
It also went on to earn Nottage her Broadway debut, her second Pulitzer Prize (her first was for 2007’s “Ruined,” set in a brothel in the Democratic Republic of Congo), and the title of “the first theatrical landmark of the Trump era” by the New Yorker.
“When I wrote ‘Sweat,’ I wrote it from a place of immense anger, I felt like the people in America needed to wake up to what’s happening in large swaths of the country.
“I sort of described myself as writing the play with the hammer in my hand because I just thought, ‘Hello! Economic stagnation is really reshaping this community. There’s a lot of pain.’ And somehow our politicians were either not recognizing this, or if they did recognize it, they were indifferent,” Nottage told the Star from her home in Brooklyn.
And, as it turns out, her rage wasn’t isolated. As “Sweat” begins its Toronto premiere at Canadian Stage this week, running from until Feb. 2 in a production directed by David Storch, southern Ontario is reeling from the same wave of factory closures, including the GM plant in Oshawa, which will cost the area more than 2,000 jobs. And the story reaches far beyond here.
“It’s kind of remarkable how it reverberates. At the beginning of last year, I got a call from a translator in Iran and said, ‘I’d like to translate the play. This is exactly what’s happening here. Our factories are shutting down and we have this influx of immigrants that are coming from Afghanistan,’ ” she said. “The world narrative is that, as technology replaces the workforce, suddenly we find people who were skilled labourers but had not necessarily had higher education, are finding themselves locked out of opportunities.”
Those opportunities may include the ability to see “Sweat” itself — Canadian Stage is producing the play at Toronto’s Berkeley Street Theatre, with listed ticket prices starting at $49. “That’s cheap in New York,” Nottage joked. Theatre has an accessibility barrier inherent to the genre — it requires travel, planning and costs that usually surpass a movie or certainly an evening at home. It is a happy coincidence that another production of “Sweat” is running at Hamilton’s Theatre Aquarius later this month and into February, but this play has the risk of being missed by the very people who inspired it.
That’s why Nottage, her director and cast of the Off-Broadway run at The Public Theater — as well as Marks the critic — went on tour with “Sweat” through the Rust Belt, across five states in six weeks.
“People felt heard, they felt seen, particularly in these pockets in which people felt like they were suffering in isolation,” Nottage said. “One of the things that I found most moving about the process was the way in which people were able to access their tears and let go of some of the pain and the shame. I’d never seen so many men cry, cry, big fat tears.”
Nottage still keeps in touch with the residents of Reading that form the true-life basis of “Sweat,” but prospects haven’t improved in the town. “None of them ever went back to work that I interviewed. Some of them have found other jobs, many of them have moved in search of work.”
But Nottage has also written a follow-up to the play that just debuted at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, Minn., also set in Reading and drawing from the same interviews. Except there’s a key difference, “Floyd’s” is a comedy. It follows a group of former prison inmates working at the titular truck-stop restaurant.
“It’s a play about mindfulness and opportunity and the way in which people can resurrect their lives in the face of adversity,” Nottage said.
“‘Sweat’ is really about the tenuous way in which we as an American culture have been living together, and when our fundamental narrative is challenged, how easily it crumbles,” she said. “Before descending into the abyss, it’s like, what can we as a culture do to figure out ways to heal? With ‘Floyd’s,’ it’s throwing people in a room who are very different, who generally you don’t see on stage, together and figuring out a way in which they can make a beautiful sandwich.”
Here’s hoping there are more sandwiches and less sweat to come in 2020.
Carly Maga is a Toronto-based theatre critic and a freelance contributor for the Star. Follow her on Twitter: @RadioMaga