Sweat review – sociological snapshot doesn’t always make for compelling drama
Probably by luck rather than design, three Pulitzer-winning dramas have opened in Sydney in one week. At Belvoir, there’s Tracy Letts’ August: Osage County; at the Seymour Centre, Matthew Lopéz’s seven-hour epic, The Inheritance; and, in the Wharf theatre, a play that, according to the Wall Street Journal, “explains Trump’s win” in 2016.
Written by the African American playwright Lynn Nottage, Sweat is set in Reading, Pennsylvania (one of those swing-state electoral districts we were so closely watching a couple of weeks ago). The vast majority of the action takes place in a bar that has for decades been the social hub for workers from a steel-tube plant. It’s a place where everybody knows your name – and where everybody knows your goddamn business, whether you like it or not.
Except for an introductory scene (revisited later) that takes place in a parole office in 2008, Sweat is set at the turn of the millennium. George W Bush is president; 9/11 is a year away, and the two young men we encountered in the parole office – Jason (James Fraser) and Chris (Tinashe Mangwana) – are best friends, as are their moms, Tracy (Lisa McCune) and Cynthia (Paula Arundell).
Related: August: Osage County review – Pamela Rabe leads stellar cast in an American tragicomedy
Life for these proud blue-collar workers has been, by and large, pretty good. Working in a unionised shop ensures a living wage, decent conditions and stability. Tracy and Cynthia have worked the same shop floor for more than 20 years, as did their parents before them. Barman Stan (Yure Covich) worked there too, until a busted machine took a piece of his leg. Their jobs are who they are.
But there’s a storm coming. One of the bar’s regulars has just burned his own house down and tried to shoot himself. Stan reports that another guy “got wind that they were gonna cut back his line at the plant … Couldn’t handle the stress.”
Cynthia calls bullshit. “You keep telling yourself that,” Stan counters. “You could wake up tomorrow and all your jobs are in Mexico, whatever, it’s this Nafta bullshit.”
“What the fuck is Nafta?” chortles Tracy. “Sounds like a laxative!”
A management job at the plant has just opened up and line workers like Tracy and Cynthia have been invited to apply for the first time. For Tracy, it’s a straight no-fuckin’-way: going white collar would be a betrayal. For Cynthia, however, whose father was denied a job in the days when the unions were staunchly racist, it’s a ladder up and out, and she takes it.
Pretty soon, she finds out why the bosses want a shop-floor worker upstairs. Cynthia is being paid to be their firewall, the bearer of bad news. As money tightens and the mood in town sours, old friendships are ripped apart, scapegoats are sought and racism rears its head.
Nottage makes it all seem pretty clear cut. Robbed of their security, working-class folk have been set against each other, competing for scraps in a game that’s rigged. And if you’re only going to lose, then why not burn your own house down?
As a sociological snapshot it makes sense but Sweat doesn’t always make for compelling drama. It can come at you like an essay sometimes; its characters like case studies (they are the product of research and interviews conducted in Reading by Nottage).
That impression is exacerbated by a Sydney Theatre Company production that looks terrific (a classic US tavern set by designer Jeremy Allen, built into an angled proscenium that owes something to Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks) but has yet to find its rhythms, those gear-changes that can shake an audience out of complacent observance.
Under the director, Zindzi Okenyo, everyone looks the part and hits their marks, but Nottage’s expository speeches still feel more page than stage. The keynote is earnestness and the play’s spiral into toxicity and violence is mechanical.
McCune is solid, Covich likewise. There’s good work from Markus Hamilton (so good in STC’s Fences) as Brucie, Cynthia’s drug-addicted ex-partner, and from Gabriel Alvarado as Oscar, the quiet Colombian American who works for Stan and who later seizes an opportunity to work at the factory that has, until now, closed its doors to people in his community. Deborah Galanos gives a good drunk act as Tracy’s and Cynthia’s barfly friend Jessie.
The show’s greatest asset is Arundell, who is, as almost always, an electrifying presence. Her Cynthia is the one character who convinces in a show in which some readings feel bulked up for a big auditorium. Immersively staged in a small theatre, I suspect Sweat would connect better.
Sweat is at Sydney Theatre Company’s Wharf 1 theatre until 22 December
