If there is anything that we have learned from television, it is that the American neighborhood bar is more than just a convenient background venue for drama and comedy. It represents a social structure where, in happy times, there is a cheerful camaraderie replete with the spinning of plans and the airing of dreams. But, in darker times, it is a symbolic spider’s web, holding tightly to those unable to escape some facet of their lives.
The bar in Lynn Nottage’s Pulitzer-winning play, Sweat, is most assuredly the latter sort. In an impressively fierce production at River & Rail Theatre Company directed by Laura Dupper, Sweat inhabits an attractive and friendly-enough, working-class bar in the rust belt town of Reading, Pa. Its denizens are local plant employees like those in dozens of similar locations that have feasted on the fruits of capitalism, but are unable, or unwilling, to adapt when that same capitalism turns on them and their livelihood.
The play, which originated at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in 2015 before having New York and Broadway productions, is infused with the turmoil that the decline of manufacturing jobs has created in the American social and political fabric. In a sense, Nottage has presaged the effect that this social turmoil has had on ethnic hatred and racism within American civilization since 2015.
Sweat begins and ends in 2008 with a scene in which a parole officer (Will Dorsey) is interviewing two young men recently out of prison. Jason (Justin Von Stein) and Chris (Davion T. Brown) were once best friends, but the prison experience has pushed them in opposite directions: Jason sports Aryan Brotherhood tats on his face, while Chris holds onto a Bible having embraced religion as his panacea. The play then jumps back to 2000 where we explore the events and emotions that brought them to that point.
Of course, Jason and Chris are denizens of the bar in question, as are their mothers: Jason’s mother Tracey (Jan Willis) and Chris’ mother Cynthia (Shinnerrie Jackson), all workers at a local steel tubing plant, and all best friends. The two women are joined at the plant, and at the bar for drinking and banter, by Jessie (Amber Collins Crane). The friendly and sympathetic bartender Stan (Jed Diamond) also once worked at the plant before a workplace accident maimed his leg. In normal times, the fact that Cynthia and her son are black, and Tracey, Jason, and Jessie are white is happily not an issue. They all grouse about their job at the plant, but it pays well and they and generations of their families have been employed there. Cynthia’s biggest problem is her money-bumming, drug-abusing, on-again-off-again husband Brucie (Dann Black), whose own layoff paints a grim picture of what awaits those in denial.
When Cynthia gets bumped up into management at the plant, and rumors of layoffs there hit the grapevine, years of friendship are strained, racial animosity emerges, and the inevitable scapegoating begins. The bar’s helper, Oscar (Gabriel Laurito), is attacked by Tracey for his Hispanic heritage, even though he is forced to explain that he was born in Reading to Columbian parents.
Having been led to this point, audiences for Sweat can see the war coming, although Nottage lets the conflict dribble out in delicious moments of verbal tirade that grow into seething rage, particularly from Tracey as her own biases and hatred surface. Nottage also keeps the explanatory ending under wraps, allowing its full tragic force to hit like a freight train of inevitableness.
Dupper has created a very tight production, allowing the dialog and expository details to tumble in layers from the actors with precision, a sure sign that the actors have absorbed their roles—and inhabit them—to a sublime degree. This cast of Sweat is uniformly excellent.
Scenic designer Claude Hardy’s bar set, infused with saturated colors of light by lighting designer Jordan Vera, pulls in the audience’s focus, just as it symbolically holds the characters in a tight grip. Kudos also go to Zackery Bennett’s sound clips that carry a lot of the exposition. Costume designer Korea Howard nailed the clothing styles.
Admittedly, River & Rail’s Sweat is a harsh and unrelenting American tragedy, but one that is beautifully captured and delivered by a terrific cast. Despite its unflinching conclusion, the play suggests with subtlety that history doesn’t necessarily have to repeat itself. If that were only true.
Sweat, by Lynn Nottage
River and Rail Theatre Company in the Old City Performing Arts Center
111 State Street
Performances through May 15
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