Stage Lights up on a black guy sitting across from a white guy with a swastika forehead tat. “Oh god,” I think to myself. “This is going to be one of THOSE plays.” Scarcely a minute later, swastika-head screams the N word. Mhm.
It’s not that “Sweat” is a bad play – it’s just that it has all the subtlety of a hydraulic press. The current production of “Sweat” at Brooklyn College (which’ll run through Saturday, Nov. 23) is pretty good, with the great acting and production aspects we’ve come to expect from BC’s theater department.
“Sweat” focuses on a group of steelworkers in Reading, Pennsylvania (the so-called “poorest town in America”) whose friendships begin to splinter as their jobs start disappearing in the post-NAFTA world. Slowly, they’re forced on opposite sides of a picket line, and racialized resentment begins to fill the gaps. The cast is up to the task here, sympathetic even at their characters’ most despicable–the only weird thing is that it’s bizarre seeing a crowd of photogenic millennials play characters allegedly in their fifties.
Speaking of “millennial,” the play is set in the year 2000, and it’s not shy about it either. A ton of effort clearly went into filling the stage with era-appropriate sounds and set-dressing: a jukebox blaring Santana’s “Smooth,” then-Governor George W. Bush campaign ads, a Game Boy Advance SP (which actually came out in ‘03 but let’s not split hairs), and the ultimate pre-Napster relic, a copy of Cher’s “Believe” CD.
This sort of touches on my problem with the play—“Sweat” feels dated, and not to the turn of the millennium, but to the far-off year of 2016. Watching “Sweat” thrusted me back into the days immediately after the presidential election, after the New York intelligentsia’s Trump-induced catatonia wore off, and they had to ask themselves: “how did this happen?” And lo, they looked at the Electoral College, and saw that big chunk of red between New York and California, and they asked: who are these people? What makes them tick? Is there some way we could understand where they’re coming from—ideally in the form of a two-plus-hour Off-Broadway play with tickets at $50 a pop? Then Lynn Nottage smiled upon the earth, and blessed us with “Sweat”–and the theater world smiled upon Nottage, and gave her a Pulitzer.
Oops, I got a little carried away there. But “Sweat” is clearly geared towards an audience that can’t tell a flat jack from a flapjack–deindustrialization for dummies. The white characters’ racism is so overt, and the dialogue so hamfisted at times, that I almost expected a character to turn towards the fourth wall and ask, “Do you guys in the audience get that the white working class has been pitted against working-class Latinos by corporate union busters looking for a scapegoat?”
“Sweat” may have benefited artistically from a bit of restraint, but then again, I doubt we’d be talking about it in 2019 if it wasn’t so on-the-nose–or if Hillary had won. This production is too good for me to dismiss it out of hand, but “Sweat” still feels like a relic from two years ago, when all art was forcibly conscripted into the #Resistance, and usually to its detriment.
Lynn Nottage’s “Sweat” (dir. Tara Elliott) is showing every evening at 7:30 p.m. until Saturday, Nov. 23, in the Tow Center for the Performing Arts’ Don Buchwald Theater. Tickets are $15 for CUNY students with valid ID. More information is available at brooklyncollegepresents.org.