Blue-Collar Blues

eater review: Sweat, Northern Stage

BY ALEX BROWN • alex@sevendaysvt.com

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 o cer and a truly a ecting 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 di erent 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.

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.

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. ➆

Info

Sweat, by Lynn Nottage, directed by Sarah Elizabeth Wansley, produced by Northern Stage. rough March 26: Wednesday and Friday, 7:30 p.m.; ursday 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

“

With animation, you can literally do anything,” said Kate Renner, assistant professor of visual art at Northern Vermont University in Lyndon. “You can make animals fly. It’s pretty magical that way.”

This weekend, Vermonters will experience some of that magic at the eighth annual Vermont Animation Festival. The two-day event — Friday and Saturday, March 24 and 25, at various locations on the NVU campus — includes a panel discussion on the animation industry in northern New England, workshops with industry experts, and a screening of animated shorts from emerging and veteran animators. While the festival is run by and largely intended for NVU students, it is open to all animators, from the professional to the aspiring.

In addition to celebrating the wizardry of animation, the fest is also an opportunity for local animators to learn from the pros, said Renner, the festival director. On Saturday, she leads a workshop called “Analog to AR: Creating Augmented Reality Animation,” which aims to teach animators how to make films using simple tools.

“A lot of people think you need a fancy app or computer or ... Adobe Creative Cloud, and you don’t,” she said. “You can create really amazing work with a phone and some household objects. It doesn’t need to be really resource-intensive.”

Renner suggested that participants will be pleasantly surprised that animation “isn’t necessarily Pixar” and that it’s something they can do themselves at home. The workshop will be available both in person and virtually on Zoom.

Friday evening features the fest’s keynote speakers, animators Ru Kuwahata and Max Porter. The married couple both