The Scoop | so & so •
By Karen Greco
Urgency on the Stage A review of The Gamm’s recent production of Pullitzer Prize-winning Sweat
Theater often wears blinders when it comes to stories that encompass the plight of blue collar America. New York City’s stages are filled with new plays featuring college-educated upper middle class urbanites sipping rosé and opining about class and race. Lynn Nottage’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Sweat, which ran November at the indispensable Gamm Theatre, gives voice to the laborers abandoned by their unions, their government, and, ultimately, their own community. When Sweat made its Broadway debut in 2017, the New York Times called it “topical.” Five years later, I’d call it urgent. With the play set in Reading, Pennsylvania – one of the key battleground states in the midterm elections – watching it just two wakeups away from voting day is a stark reminder of how little we’ve progressed in the last five years.
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The time-traveling play opens in 2008, with two young men, Jason and Chris, separately meeting with their parole officer. We flash back to the year 2000 to learn exactly why these former best friends spent time in prison. Reading is a factory town and the majority of its citizens “work the line,” just like their parents and grandparents before them. In 2000, the tentacles of NAFTA were beginning to choke the life out of the very unions that brought manufacturing workers solidly into the middle class. At the local watering hole (a keenly observed set design by Jessica Hill Kidd), the lives of three friends – Tracey, Cynthia, and Jessie – who are also co-workers at the local factory, unfold. As the whiskey flows, they share their stories, filled with the pride in getting their union cards and doing hard physical
labor in their quest to make a decent living. These people are workers, we are reminded. It’s in their blood. Indeed, Tracey and Cynthia both have sons, and these boys, like their parents and grandparents before them, are newly minted union members. A palpable anger simmers just below the surface of the characters. After a lifetime spent as laborers, their broken spirits are reflected through their broken bodies; barkeep Stan literally went lame because of malfunctioning equipment to which management turned a blind eye. But these soul- and body-crushing jobs form the foundation of each character’s identity. The impersonal word deindustrialization has real human consequences. So when Cynthia gets promoted to a management position, the bonds of friendship
Photo courtesy of The Gamm
L to R: Conor Delaney as Jason, Jason Quinn as Brucie, Erik Robles as Chris
