Some plays receive awards because the competition the year they were in the running turned out weak. Others receive awards because they are so good that they crushed any competition they might have had, dazzling with their plot turns and delivering sucker-punches that leave the viewer deeply moved long after seeing the play. Lynn Nottage's Sweat, in a solid Dallas Theater Center production at the Kalita Humphreys Theater, belongs to the second category.
It is hard to know what to write about the play without giving away key plot points so I will start by staying the obvious: go and see it. The first scene didn't quite work for me (one of the actors was overacting), but the production quickly hit its stride and had me riveted on my seat, in spite of the narrative structure going back and forth between 2000 and 2008. Every conflict in that play was pitch-perfect. Some of the scenes that took my breath away include the one where the woman who joined the factory at age 18 talks about the dreams she had had of quitting after 6 months and going to visit the world with her boyfriend (but she chose to remain at her blue-collar union job instead and never left Berks County), the violence that is hinted at in the blurb of the play finally happens (it is not quite what you think) and the very last one that shows the aftermath at the bar. I was also moved by the depiction of the two drug addicts in the play, especially the one who doesn't start out as a drug addict.
The play hit close to home because I spent 11 years in Lehigh Valley, PA (12 years if you don't count my sabbatical), which is mentioned once in the play, and Reading, PA was only one hour drive away. I met once someone at Air Products once who lived in Reading, I'm not sure if it was because his family was from there or if it was because he was able to afford a big house for very cheap, but I remember someone talking about the very high poverty rate already back then, and having seen the Lehigh Valley after the demise of Bethlehem Steel, I can believe Reading was named the city with the highest poverty rate in America back in 2011. (The poverty rate was about 40%. I am told things have been improving.)
For me those workers who gather at the bar after their shift could have been Bethlehem Steel workers in Bethlehem, PA back in the early 1990s. I've stopped viewing Bethlehem as home a long time ago (I love Dallas too much to be nostalgic about it), but I've lived the longest there of any place I've lived since I moved to the U.S., so it still means something to me to watch a play about people who could have been my neighbors back then.
Because of the recent layoffs of 43 employees at the Dallas Morning News, including their culture critic Chris Vognar, the play, which features a strike and someone who crosses the picket line to do the job at much lower pay than what an union employee would require, also made me think in unexpected ways about today's economy. Undoubtedly this free review of a play I've seen on my own personal blog does not affect the long-term economic prospects of theater critics and other culture journalists, but what of free professional review sites that are financed through advertising? Yet, people have the right to do what they want - write for free to get their names out there, read for free to avoid paying for content they can find online easily.
Newspapers still haven't found a compelling way to define and sell a financially viable product. After reading about the re-organization, I felt that the Dallas Morning News wants to focus on local news and not on news about books or movies that readers can glean from the New York Times Review of Books or rottentomatoes.com. Yet there is value in hearing multiple experts on the same topic, particularly when they disagree with each other. Perhaps syndicated columns would work best, with multiple newspapers in different markets sharing the cost of paying an employee's salary and benefits. Or should journalists develop a fundraising or patronage model? It is time to try groundbreakingly innovative solutions to the problem of newspapers' financial viability in the digital age - something that goes beyond defining the specifics of a paywall.
Quite obviously, unpaid reviewers do the job of paid reviewers for free. We like to think that a byline in the Dallas Morning News or the Dallas Observer is a sign of quality while some blogs would be better left unseen, but clearly that was not enough to keep the Dallas Morning News employees their jobs. Sweat only talks about unionized factory workers, but the increased precarity of just about every job in the United States is staggering. Tensions run high in the play between the union workers and management, the union workers and the young man who crosses the picket line, the white workers and the non-white workers. Tensions run high in the country too. The play offers no solution, except for the theme of education as a way out of this mess and a glimmer of decency in the last scene. But plays don't have to make policy. They have to move us, to shake us, to increase our understanding of our fellow countrymen, and to make us view the world in ways we hadn't imagined before. Sweat succeeds superbly.
We're going tonight, so I will wait to read your review. I read play last week.Thr, Grei
Posted by: Greg McConeghy | January 25, 2019 at 07:29 PM