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Three Readings of Reading, Pennsylvania: Approaching Lynn Nottage's Sweat and Douglas Carter Beane's Shows for Days
SHOWS FOR DAYS. By Douglas Carter Beane. Directed by Jerry Zaks. Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater at Lincoln Center Theater, New York City.
SWEAT. By Lynn Nottage. Directed by Kate Whoriskey. Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Angus Bowmer Theatre, Ashland.
Courtney Elkin Mohler, part 1: Sweat, 14 August 2015
While few Americans were left unscathed by the financial crisis of 2007-08, the manufacturing industry and the unions upon which its workers relied began to rapidly decline over the prior decade when the north american free Trade agreement (nafTa) was passed into law. nafTa and the spiraling set of deregulatory policies it epitomized are specters in Lynn nottage's new play Sweat, which premiered at the oregon Shakespeare festival (oSf) in July 2015. Under the keen direction of Kate Whoriskey, who also directed the award-winning premiere of nottage's Ruined in chicago in 2008, the extraordinarily talented and well-cast ensemble communicated the interpersonal devastation caused by the collapse of american industry. a joint commission by oSf and arena Stage, the production will open in Washington, D.c., in January 2016. The play's themes are cardinally relevant as president obama rushes to pass his own multinational trade agreement, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which opponents predict will result in further economic disparity, job losses, and declining wages for workers.
Nottage transforms intimate testimony and scrupulous research on the social and economic hardships experienced by the people she interviewed in reading, pennsylvania, one of the nation's poorest cities, into a character-driven drama that explores the human costs exacted by the contradictions of late neoliberal capitalism. Like nafTa, the Bush administration and its economic policies also loom as the story unfolds, with scenes bouncing between the years 2008 and 2000. The tragedy showcased in Sweat then rests on a kind of "ironized nostalgia," to borrow a term of literary critic Linda Hutcheon;1 the wrenching, grim scenes that take place in 2008 beg us to examine our feelings of nostalgia for those moments in 2000 when we did not yet realize the extent to which the neoliberal project would turn america's industrial cities into economic ghost towns. In a style normally associated with docudrama, the design relied upon crisp projections of text...