Three Readings of Reading, Pennsylvania: Approaching Lynn Nottage’s Sweat and Douglas Carter Beane’s Shows for Days

Courtney Elkin Mohler, part 1: Sweat, 14 August 2015

While few Americans were left unscathed by the financial crisis of 2007–08, the manufacturing industry and the unions upon which its workers relied began to rapidly decline over the prior decade when the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was passed into law. NAFTA and the spiraling set of deregulatory policies it epitomized are specters in Lynn Nottage’s new play Sweat, which premiered at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival (OSF) in July 2015. Under the keen direction of Kate Whoriskey, who also directed the award-winning premiere of Nottage’s Ruined in Chicago in 2008, the extraordinarily talented and well-cast ensemble communicated the interpersonal devastation caused by the collapse of American industry. A joint commission by OSF and Arena Stage, the production will open in Washington, D.C., in January 2016. The play’s themes are cardinally relevant as President Obama rushes to pass his own multinational trade agreement, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which opponents predict will result in further economic disparity, job losses, and declining wages for workers.

Nottage transforms intimate testimony and scrupulous research on the social and economic hardships experienced by the people she interviewed in Reading, Pennsylvania, oneof the nation’s poorest cities, into a character-driven drama that explores the human costsexacted by the contradictions of late neoliberal capitalism. Like NAFTA, the Bush administration and its economic policies also loom as the story unfolds, with scenes bouncing between the years 2008 and 2000. The tragedy showcased in Sweat then rests on a kind of “ironized nostalgia,” to borrow a term of literary critic Linda Hutcheon;¹ the wrenching, grim scenes that take place in 2008 beg us to examine our feelings of nostalgia for those moments in 2000 when we did not yet realize the extent to which the neoliberal project would turn America’s industrial cities into economic ghost towns. In a style normally associated with docudrama, the design relied upon crisp projections of text to communicate the time and setting for each scene. Timely broadcast news clips were also used to transition between scenes, conveying that the national political discourse of these two election years significantly framed the play’s action. Toward the beginning of act 2, President George W. Bush’s giant talking head was momentarily projected onto the stark cement wall that backed the most depressing of the play’s scenes—an example of the presentational signage and audiovisual transitions that smattered the bitingly realistic dialogue, plot, and character development. With a nod toward Brecht’s A-effect, these scene changes disrupted the emotional power of the realistic aspects of Nottage’s storytelling and contextualized them within their specific sociopolitical moments.

The script centers on a group of steel workers whose close-knit relationships corrode along with their union-backed jobs at Olstead’s Metal Tubing. The play opens in the year 2008 as parole officer Evan (Tyrone Wilson) councils two young men: a penitential, recently born-again Chris (Tramell Tillman), who is African American; and a defiant Jason (Stephen Michael Spencer), whose face is covered in Aryan nation tattoos garnered during his prison stay. When the scene switches to 2000, we meet three long-time friends, Cynthia (Kimberly Scott), Tracey (Terri McMahon), and Jessie (K. T. Vogt). These women have been working together on the floor of Olstead’s for decades and have gathered to celebrate Tracey’s birthday in their favorite post-shift bar. At that relatively simpler time, Chris and Jason, the sons of Cynthia and Tracey, respectively, were best friends who also worked on the line jacking steel at Olstead’s.

Most of the scenes take place in the year 2000, announced by projections (for example, March 2000). Over the course of the passing year the...