‘Americans are a very pig-headed people’

As Martha Plimpton returns to the stage, the New Yorker tells Helen Brown how her country is going backwards

‘America is a funny place,” says Martha Plimpton. “There’s this myth of forward thinking, economic adventurism and the entrepreneurial spirit. But we’re really a very stubborn, pigheaded people. We’re unwilling to change our habits, to look ahead, move on. Yes, there are a few billionaire innovators, but they’re not representative of the conservative American spirit.”

Plimpton, who was born in New York in 1970, is in London to reprise the lead role of Tracey in Sweat, Lynn Nottage’s Pulitzerwinning play, which transfers to the West End this month following a successful run at the Donmar Warehouse. For Plimpton, Tracey is the living, smoking embodiment of an American tendency “to cling blindly to whatever gives status”.

Set in a failing steelworks in 2008, Sweat premiered off Broadway in 2016, days before Donald Trump won the US presidential election, and has been widely credited with explaining how a man born into elite, metropolitan privilege won the hearts and minds of bluecollar, rust-belt America.

Nottage, who already had one Pulitzer under her belt for

Ruined, her 2009 play about Congolese women surviving the civil war, wrote Sweat after conducting extensive interviews with the inhabitants of Reading, Pennsylvania, one of the poorest cities in America. Deindustrialisation had led to 40 per cent of Reading’s population slipping below the poverty line to become, to borrow Trump’s phrase, “forgotten people”.

Plimpton says Tracey is: “like everybody else in the story, in that her whole, worker-bee life is centred around this steel mill. She works on the shop floor, packing steel tubes. Her grandfather worked there. Her father works there. Her son works there. Her identity is wrapped up in the mill. Even though she is third generation, she thinks of herself as a pioneering American.”

Plimpton continues: “She’s the kind of person who uses the word ‘snowflake’. She’ll say, ‘We can’t make a joke any more? We’re all so f------ sensitive now?’ It gives her a sense of power and control. And it makes her ugly.”

British audiences are used to seeing Plimpton as a struggling woman. She jokes that repeated appearances as down-and-out characters in television crime dramas have left her associated with the role of “pregnant heroin addict”. But we last saw her on the small screen giving an Emmy-winning performance as the hard-shelled, warm-hearted Virginia Slims Chance in surreal sitcom Raising Hope (2013-2014). Before that, she

picked up another Emmy for guest starring as the tenacious attorney, Patti Nyholm, in the hit American legal drama The Good Wife (2012).

“I also did Law and Order,” she tells me over tea upstairs at the Donmar. “The show was huge in America. But you have your own crime shows here… I saw Line of Duty for the first time the other night while I was ironing. I didn’t realise that was a big deal until I was on the Tube the next day and saw it all over the papers.”

For those of us who grew up watching Plimpton roll her teenage eyes on the big screen in such classics as The Goonies (1985), The Mosquito Coast (1986) and Running on Empty (1988), the idea of her ironing, or using public transport requires quite an imaginative leap. In fact, she is terrifically down to earth in (unironed) blue cotton shirt and denim culottes: the only arty touch a silk scarf knotted at the neck. When I tell her she doesn’t strike me as being at all starry or thespy she bursts into raucous, throaty laughter. “It’s early in the day,” she says. “You wait until the sun goes down!”

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