DETROIT, MI — The United States is going through a painful era of transition that has devastated many small towns in the Midwest and Southeast. Despite recent protectionist trade policies, it is becoming increasingly difficult to sustain manufacturing in the US due to the high health care costs that employers have to pay their workers. Labor costs are just a lot lower in Mexico and Eastern Europe.
Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Lynn Nottage skillfully captures the fear and inertia of people who leave high school for a “stakes” manual job and become pawns in the larger game of economics. “Sweat” is an appropriate title to capture both the daily lives of these workers and their vulnerability to a global economy.
Cynthia (Yolanda Jack) is an African American garment worker in Reading, PA in 2000. Tracy (Leah Smith), a white woman, is also on the phone. Her sons () also work in the factory. Cynthia’s drug addict, financially distressed husband Brucie (Will Bryson) finds himself in a lockout at his factory. Jessie (Annabelle Young) is a drunken frontier worker who embodies and represents every small-town frontier worker who aspired to see the world, only to find himself trapped in his own bad decisions.
The playwright researched this play by surveying a community in Reading in 2011 and interviewing scores of residents who had lost their manufacturing and textile jobs. Reading has always been one of the poorest cities in the US, with bars and dollar stores doing better business than downtown or libraries.
The characters in Nottage’s play are literally pawns on a chessboard who are the first to be sacrificed when the wind blows fiercely. They are the ones who are being trampled on by the rising and affluent classes. They are also the ones who play with promises made and broken in American politics. They are undereducated and have seen their vision of the American dream evaporate before their eyes over the past thirty years, and alas, they may be wooed by the fool’s gold of trade tariffs and election-year chatter about “manufacturing jobs,” “Buy American,” um protect their jobs.
Nottage does an excellent job of capturing the ignorance of these people without respecting them. When we hear Tracy and Cynthia talk about the dignity of their work and their ethics towards repetitive work, we can respect the simplicity of their ideal. But when they talk about the plant as if mom and dad would take care of them if they just work hard, it’s hard for us not to feel as sorry for them as we would a child suffering from one opened a lemonade stand on a rainy day.
The ability and willingness of companies to unload their machines and tools from factories in the middle of the night while workers are asleep has been part of the American business fabric for decades. Companies really don’t care that much about their employees. They are disposable and can be easily replaced. If workers make a mistake, they are fired and lose their health insurance. When CEOs make a mistake, they get fired with a party and a check, sometimes ranging from $10 million to $30 million. When we’ve seen the lack of blood and loyalty on the employer side over the decades, it’s hard to understand why these workers put so much heart and soul into being employees. They just don’t know any better because they weren’t curious enough to seek a better education.
And when we see what the plant is doing to Cynthia, Tracey, and Brucie, we shake our heads as we hear their sons talk about the plant with the same level of addiction. When Chris (Will Street) makes plans to go to college to earn a teaching certificate, Jason (Alex Pobutsky) slams him for stepping out of her bubble. In fact, Chris wouldn’t make much as a teacher, but even his drive to come out of the factory, even for less than stellar money, is refreshing to hear and a glimmer of hope.
Detroit’s Rep’s production is as good as it gets anywhere else. You don’t have to travel to New York to see a great cast and production. Nottage’s lyrics and dialogue are excellent, which is reason enough for the play to be performed frequently and across the country.
Race relations are intelligently explored. Cynthia and Tracey are friends, but everything changes when Cynthia is promoted to supervisor. Jealousy reigns, and Cynthia “goes there” and says that Cynthia got the job instead because she’s a black woman, not because she was a better candidate.
Sweat is directed by Jeff Nahan. Harry Wetzel’s set is great. He perfectly captures the atmosphere of the dog-eared factory bar where the owner, Stan (Patrick O’Lear), a former assembly line worker turned disabled, can take shots at the bar timed to the end of a shift, before the customers actually arrive turn up .
The story is told at a different time, between 2000 and 2008, when Tracey and Cynthia and their boys are no longer employed at the plant, which offered workers a 60% pay cut to keep their jobs.
Watching life fall apart in this glass bubble in Reading, Pennsylvania isn’t all that uplifting. But when we engage with the pain and suffering of people we don’t know and don’t have around our tables often, it’s a glimpse of what has made the US economy so lopsided.
Comments are closed.