Sweat by Lynn Nottage
Lynn Nottage’s Sweat is a play about race, identity, humanity, and the economy. The play opens with conversations between a parole officer and Jason and Chris. Both Jason and Chris are ex-convicts who just had an encounter leaving Jason with a black eye. The opening action of the play is set in a fictional bar in Pennsylvania’s town of Reading. The action was largely set in 2000, but there is a brief prologue that takes place in the year 2008. The play shifts in time from 2008 and switches scenes back to 2000. The play has eight main characters who have been used to depict decades of deindustrialization, concessions, and loss of jobs leading to poor living standards and social evils. Nottage wrote Sweat o to describe the struggles and challenges of American working-class.
At the time when Nottage starts assembling this play, the city of Reading was ranked among the poorest cities in America with more than 40% of its residents living below the poverty line. The history and the economic state of Reading stand out from other cities in the United States of America. Several factories have been closed, and operations are drastically reduced, making people lose their jobs and sources of income. Examples of plants that have been shutdown include Lucent Technologies, AT &T, Hershey Company, and Dana Corporation among others. A background check on the state of Pennsylvania reveals that more than 300000 jobs were lost between the year 1998 and 2013.
In the run-up to the writing of Sweat, Nottage interviews several people, and she gets information that helps her come up with the fictional characters in this play. She situates the play within a specific place and time, and she frames the action using exact dates to bring out the narrative’s scenes through supertitles. The setting of the play’s final scene is on October 18, 2008. In this scene, Chris, Jason, Oscar and Stan are used to piece together the different strands of the story grimly. Nottage draws a vaguely humanistic and unsentimental conclusion as the play ends. On the current events, Sweat fits appropriately in a political environment in the run-up to the presidential election year. The cry of desperation and anger can be heard both from electorates and non-electorates.
Lynn Nottage’s Sweat is a play that does not only reflect the daily life of people in Reading but also for the entire United States of America and other capitalist countries. The play depicts truthful accounts of racism and classism in American society then and today. Through an excellent cast, the play conveys a message that workers from different nationalities and races go through the same struggles and challenges in their various places of work. Nottage writes Sweat at a time when cultural dialogue and the theatre industry are dominated with white supremacists, and there is an urgent need to bridge the gap between class and race. Ethnic and racial tensions in contemporary American society have been depicted in the play as a matter-of-fact. The actions and stories of the workers and their families demonstrate how similar their struggles are despite the underlying differences of skin color and social class. From this play by Lynn Nottage, it emerges that basic social issues remain identical despite the differences and changes in ethnic and racial compositions.
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