Review: Lynn Nottage's SWEAT, A Moving Labor Tragedy

The doorway to the neighborhood bar designed with great detail by John Lee Beatty for director Kate Whoriskey's tense and finely-acted mounting of Lynn Nottage's hard-hitting new drama, Sweat, is decorated with a neon light advertising Yuengling Beer, the Pennsylvania brew that dates back to 1829.

Those involved with the production would have no way of knowing that during their preview period at The Public Theater, Yuengling would suddenly be making headlines after calls for boycotts followed its owner, Dick Yuengling's, endorsement of Donald Trump. However, the innocent-looking display would also serve as a symbol of trouble ahead for those aware of Dick Yuengling's longtime anti-union sentiments and his support for Pennsylvania to become a right-to-work state.

Though Nottage's play has nothing to do with the brewery, its main thrust is the effect on a community, and on a group of friends, when a factory town loses its factory. The action is set in Reading, Pennsylvania, a once-thriving city that, due to an exodus of industry, was determined in the 2010 census to have the nation's highest percentage of people living in poverty.

The bulk of Sweat dramatizes events that take place in 2000 but the text is bookended by scenes that show how their aftermath is still felt eight years later.

At the tavern run by Stan (an amiable James Colby) workers at the fictional Olstead steel mill regularly gather to wind down after shifts. Stan spent 28 years working for Olstead, and like many in the community he figured the factory would give him a lifetime of steady work followed by a good pension. But the higher-ups left him high and dry after he was injured due to faulty machinery.

Close friends Tracey (JoAnna Day) and Cynthia (Michelle Wilson) have spent decades working the line and their sons (Will Pullen and Khris Davis) are also employed by Olstead.

Tracey is a descendent of the German-American population that built the city's prosperity and she's happy to stay in her dead end job as long as she has union security and regular raises. African-American Cynthia is looking for advancement and has just been promoted to a supervisor's position. While Tracy is happy for her friend, with rumors of downsizing and jobs being sent to Mexico, she's also suspicious that she's hiding information.

Day and Wilson do excellent work playing the subtext of racial tension lying slightly beneath their labor/management conflict. Day tinges Tracey's claims of betrayal with a privileged attitude while Wilson's Cynthia refuses to apologize for small victories over racism in her pursuit of a better life.

When the union goes on strike, Stan's Columbian-American bar-back Oscar (excellent Carlo Albán), who is generally ignored by the others, takes a job as a replacement. The lower than union wage offered to him by Olstead is much higher than what he can get paid anywhere else, and when he's accused of scabbing he angrily defends his actions by pointing out the racism that kept his father down and now keeps him from being able to make a decent living.

Inevitably, tensions build into onstage violence, staged with horrific realism by U. Jonathan Toppo.

While the decline of American communities when jobs are sent to other countries is a familiar subject, Nottage's even-handed treatment of multiple viewpoints, giving sympathy to all sides, makes Sweat a truly realistic and moving tragedy.