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View ProfilesPublished March 22, 2023 at 10:00 a.m. | Updated April 2, 2023 at 7:28 p.m.
The economy that worked just fine for their parents and grandparents is breaking down for factory workers Tracey and Cynthia. Their kids, in their twenties and just starting out, will have it worse. In 2000, management can win any battle with labor by moving jobs offshore. Lynn Nottage's harrowing play Sweat focuses on nine residents of Reading, Pa., one of the poorest cities in America and about to get poorer.
The play won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and Northern Stage presents it with fine performances that capture Nottage's ability to express big ideas through the small actions of complex characters. Sweat is a tragedy capable of shattering the viewer, but, like all tragedies, it's also a light left on in the darkness to show us the way back out.
The play's main setting is a favorite bar where everyone drinks too much and stays too late. Most of the story occurs in 2000, but the script sometimes flips forward to 2008 to present outcomes that we must reconcile with the lives we've seen the characters living before. Though the story is told with the characters at the forefront, it's the economy that drives wedges between them, forcing them to pick sides when no side is right and nudging them toward hatred and mistrust.
Cynthia, who is Black, and her white best friend, Tracey, work on the floor at a steel tubing plant. The jobs are physically demanding, but both women expect to hold them all their lives. Tracey's father and grandfather did, and her son Jason is just starting on the same path. Cynthia's son Chris has been considering college, but he opts for the plant for now. College costs money.
Most days end with a drink at the watering hole where Stan presides as bartender, gossip and peacekeeper. Everyone ignores Oscar the Colombian dishwasher, who was born in the U.S. but is disdained by the regulars who assume he's an immigrant. Jessie might pass out from too many gimlets; Cynthia's ex, Brucie, might show up on payday hoping for a handout. The bar is where they're all happy, celebrating birthdays with frosted cake and shots. Then Cynthia and Tracey apply for the same management job, and Cynthia gets it. The fuse is lit.
Nottage presents people we think we know and makes us stop to see them. The play starts with a flash-forward to 2008, in which we see Jason as a tight-lipped smart-ass with his parole officer. Jason's jailhouse white power tats are ugly smudges on his pale, drawn face. The parole officer then checks in on Chris, who's living in a church rectory and struggling to restart his life after prison. When we see the two men in the next scene, set eight years earlier, they're robust buddies who root for the Sixers and have lots to hope for. We must watch them through the lens of their ruined future.
Nottage captures the rhythm and language of the working class, and director Sarah Elizabeth Wansley seeks a parallel realism in her staging of the play. She gives the characters little things to do as they speak or hang in the background. Stan tallies receipts; Jessie makes lean-tos of coasters; Chris and Jason chat while bouncing quarters in a glass, applying beer pong shot-drinking rules.
These actions confer authenticity, making a story onstage ring with truth. But the deeper proof is in the performances. The actors never hit false notes by playing a moment too big and pushing the viewer out of the play to admire it. With nuance and clarity, they play people, not pathos.
Stori Ayers portrays Cynthia as both stalwart and playful, with an underlying strength that looks like just enough to survive everything life throws at her. Anne Torsiglieri gives Tracey a firecracker volatility that's thrilling to watch. The life of the party when all's well, Tracey can glower like the darkest of foes when she feels pushed.
As Jason, Robert David Grant plays a striving young man with heart and then pulls deep inside his shell as an ex-con; it's an agonizing contrast. Playing Chris, Christopher B. Portley lets the character's hopefulness shine brightly as he recalls how union strikers looked to him like warriors when he was a kid. As an adult, he discovers how powerless they are.
Matthew Henerson makes Stan the good-natured bartender everyone takes for granted, and Marcus Raye Pérez lets Oscar simmer very quietly until he has to erupt. Anna O'Donoghue plays Jessie in a mist of alcohol and memories. Greg Alverez Reid doubles as the seen-it-all parole officer and a truly affecting Brucie who gently sinks lower and lower as the play progresses.
Scenic designer David L. Arsenault creates a warm bar and runs the iron beams of a factory above it, a yellow crane hook dangling. In the window, a huge flag is a reminder that Reading has pledged allegiance to an American dream.
Sound designer Melanie Chen Cole kicks off each scene with sound bites from the news, but they frustrate, flying by too fast for the audience to place them. Costumes by Jaymee Ngernwichit fastidiously re-create the period, often with a little wit.
Nottage shows that policies such as NAFTA put a corporation's freedom to earn a higher profit above a worker's freedom to earn a living. Workers can't see the businessmen and politicians who make those rules, so they turn to the faces in front of them. The enemies they find are competing for jobs, too, but they look different or came from somewhere else or tried to climb the economic ladder. Society's betrayal of the workers is complete once they begin fighting among themselves.
Because Sweat compresses a year into episodes, the audience sees the characters' downward trajectory more clearly than they can. But the play challenges us to watch them with empathy. To stand on their level, right where they fall.
April 2, 2023: This story was updated to more completely describe the character of Oscar the dishwasher.
Sweat, by Lynn Nottage, directed by Sarah Elizabeth Wansley, produced by Northern Stage. Through March 26: Wednesday and Friday, 7:30 p.m.; Thursday and Saturday, 2 and 7:30 p.m.; and Sunday, 5 p.m., at Barrette Center for the Arts in White River Junction. $19-69. northernstage.org
The original print version of this article was headlined "Blue-Collar Blues | Theater review: Sweat, Northern Stage"
Tags: Theater
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