Stage Door bringing you intermittent theater reviews when we manage to get there. Here's Nathaniel R
Awards have a way of hyping certain creations, especially the modest kind, to a point where disappointment is an obvious risk. The gifted playwright Lynn Nottage is only 52 but Sweat is already her second Pulitzer winner for Drama (the first was for Ruined). This places her in the rather astonishing company of prolific geniuses Tennessee Williams and August Wilson, and just one prize away from Edward Albee (!) and marks her as the most awarded living playwright and the most awarded female playwright, living or dead. As a result I spent the first act of Sweat wondering what the fuss was about. The Fuss does not identify itself in the second act but by then you can meet the play halfway with its likeable flawed characters and appreciate Nottage's earnest thematic thrust as the play mourns the loss of intersectional solidarity, without clumsily naming it as such...
The play begins with probation officer interviews with two men, who we soon learn who were once best friends, who are newly released from prison for a crime we are not made privvy to.
Colby, Day and Wilson in "Sweat"
The bulk of the play takes place in flashback when the ex-cons were hopeful young men just starting to work at the local factory that employs their mothers, and their parents before them, too. The predictable, though no less sad for it, trajectory then is to watch and wait for the crime which will destroy them. Nearly every character in the show is a former employee / current employee / or would be employee of a local factory which is keeping the town alive... or on life support rather. Persistent fears about looming economic disasterare washed down with the booze at the local bar where every scene takes place.
Will Pullen and Khris Davis as the young men who will make a tragic mistakeThe entire cast of Sweat including the deservedly ubiquitous Alison Wright (The Americans and Feud) is strong ably disguising the play's central flaw. Sweat wants to make grand pronouncements about the collapse of America's industrial past, capitalistic greed, racial tension, and human solidarity, but it's both too specific and too vague. While beautifully acted, the characters feel less than fully three dimensional and more like broad strokes "types". This wouldn't be a problem in a more stylized or poetic show but Sweat appears, always, to be aiming for gritty realism and boozy bluntness down to its intertitles to tell you exactly when and where its events take place despite it being a work of fiction.
Since the strong cast does the heavy lifting at selling the play's tragedy and its humor, it's only fitting to name MVPs. James Colby is believably endearing as the bar manager everyone rushes to for a sounding board ... and booze. The Tony nominations understandably went to Johanna Day (The Knick) and Michelle Wilson in the most thematically articulate roles. Their tight friendship, in some ways the bedrock of this bar crowd, is the first (of many) casualties, large and small, in a war between Union and management that creates all the drama after work in this anytown bar.
Michelle Wilson & Johanna Day
Sweat, nominated for three Tony Awards (Best Play and two nominations for Featured Actress) is currently playing an open ended run at Studio 54.