‘Sweat’ a potent chronicle of corroding American dream
Lynn Nottage’s Pulitzer winner is timely drama of Rust Belt factory workers
Lynn Nottage’s gritty steel industry play should make all workers “Sweat,” not just blue-collar ones.
This Pulitzer Prize-winning drama may be set in a dive bar in a Rust Belt town where beleaguered factory workers watch their futures corrode. But the real force of the tale, sensitively directed by Loretta Greco in its regional premiere at San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theater, lies in its palpable sense of shared loss.
At a time when many economists predict that some combination of artificial
intelligence and robotics will soon make many professions obsolete, the play is an epitaph for all working stiffs. Once the jobs are gone, the hope isn’t
far behind. The rub is that most of us never see the change coming for us. The workers here get buffeted by a litany of job losses, crime and despair until tears have washed the sweat clean.
After three generations of loyalty to the same company, Stan (the always potent Rod Gnapp) sure didn’t. But once he mangled a leg on the assembly line, he was shown the door. Now he pours drinks and holds court in a wonderfully dilapidated bar (set by Andrew Boyce), its stools and booths steeped in generations of booze and desperation: “This is America, right? You’d think that would mean something. … Bottom line, they don’t understand that human decency is at the core of everything.”
While the gifted Nottage (“Ruined,” “Crumbs from the Table of Joy”) has overwritten some parts of the piece, the second act drags and the ending feels anticlimactic, she unerringly captures the fury of the disenfranchised. Grounded in research and reporting, “Sweat” chronicles the end of an era in America.
Slipping back and forth in time, we see how the rise and fall of the plant shapes the destiny of all its workers. Some of the transitions are fussy, pulling us out of the action, but Greco, Magic Theatre artistic director, reveals the heart of the play beautifully, framing naked performances within a rich and deep sense of social and historical context.
Cut loose from her job and the dignity it afforded her, Tracey (a magnetic Lise Bruneau) goes from being a fiercely independent single mother with a tribe of friends and a badass attitude to a shattered drug addict down to her last five bucks.
The dreamer Jessie (Sarah Nina Hayon) drinks herself into oblivion. Tracey’s son Jason (David Darrow), who once proudly worked at the factory with his mom, descends into dreams of white supremacy, wearing his racism on the tattoos on his face.
The formidable Cynthia (Tonye Patano), who gets promoted off the factory floor, gets branded a traitor when the company decides to shed its union workforce
for temp workers and outsourcing to Mexico. Her son Chris (Kadeem Ali Harris) realizes too late that going to college may be his only way out.
The epic battles between Cynthia and Tracey, two besties who tear each other to bits over a promotion, strike at the core of “Sweat.” These two strong women stick by each other through the strife of bad marriages, parenthood and aging, but once their pocketbooks are on the line, their friendship is over. Bigotry and fear hijack the conversation.
They all vent on poor Oscar (Jed Parsario), the Colombian-American barback tempted into crossing the picket line. Instead of trying to confront those calling the shots, they turn their ire on the powerless.
The solidarity the factory workers once had, the bond that felt as strong as concrete, turns out to be as fickle as the American economy.
Nottage explores how quickly even a tightknit community that has long embraced its diversity can devolve into racial hatred once the jobs head to Mexico.