Sweat
★★★½
Umstead Park United Church of Christ, Raleigh
Despite one character’s assertions, very little is as it ought to be at the bitter end of Lynn Nottage’s 2017 Pulitzer Prize-winning drama, Sweat, which is currently challenging local audiences in a Justice Theater Project production at Umstead Park United Church of Christ.
At the conclusion, a character who was first crippled in an industrial accident and later maimed when a drunken union steelworker tried to take vengeance on a scab slowly pushes a walker across the neighborhood bar where he was injured—cleaning rag in hand, still on the clock.
It’s hardly how any of us would care to picture our retirement years. But in Nottage’s dismal, lengthy, but historically accurate depiction of the decline of American unions, it’s an outcome only somewhat below par when set alongside the other consequences of a working class being abandoned by manufacturers—and federal labor safeguards—in the Rust Belt at the turn of the century.
Broken families, debilitating addictions, foreclosed neighborhoods, eviscerated cities, and record prison populations are shown or alluded to during this unsparing three-hour drama. A surreal air of denial hangs as cutbacks, shortened hours, and job losses at other factories encroach upon the cozy little booth at the bar where optimistic Cynthia (J. Ra’Chel Fowler), rough-edged Tracey (Andrea Twiss), and self-medicating Jessie (Kelly Caniglia) get hammered to celebrate birthdays and unwind after their shifts at a steel-tubing plant.
Then it’s not just distant neighbors who are buckling under labor strife. After slowly destabilizing during a long factory lockout, Cynthia’s estranged husband, Brucie (Gerald Lou Campbell), sweet-talks his way back into her house over the holidays and steals all the Christmas presents. Among a younger generation of workers, Chris (Brandonn Odom) sees trouble coming and plans to leave the factory—a move that leaves his tightly wound friend, Jason, (Matthew Hager), feeling betrayed.
But the most palpable element that director Jerry Sipp brings to Sweat is a sense of place. That doesn’t just apply to a particular locale, but to the all-but-unalterable social positions most of his characters occupy. “Knowing one’s place”—in the worst possible way—limits their ambitions, imaginations, and survival options; when Brucie, Tracey, or Jason lose that place, no other context or coherent identity exists.
We’re not surprised when bigotry and crab-mentality classism appear to further divide an already-conquered group. When Cynthia dreams of a managerial promotion, Tracey says, “Management’s for them, not us.” After Chris confides that he’s enrolling in a university teaching program, Jason solemnly challenges him: “What, the floor ain’t good enough for you?”
The greatest poignancy lies in a group of people honoring a social contract for too long after their employers have abandoned it. In Sweat, it’s obvious that the wrong people have forgotten their place.
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