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One of the most prolific American playwrights, Lynn Nottage defies categorization. Her plays do not correspond to a particular genre, aesthetic or polemic, and while race, class, and gender are central to her work, her treatment of those categories is catholic. In Ruined, a play in which she originally conceived the "morally ambiguous" brothel madame Mama Nadi as an African Mother Courage, she is concerned with the wartime exploitation of women in the Congo.1 In Tabulation, or The Re-Education of Undine, she offers a playful and satirical take on an upwardly mobile African American woman who rejects her roots, while in Intimate Apparel, a heartbreaking tale set in turn-of-the-century New York, her subject is a young seamstress of color attracted to both a Hasidic shopkeeper-a forbidden but genuine relationship-and a Caribbean man who ultimately absconds with her life's savings. Adrienne Macki Braconi has reflected on Nottage's "slippery borders" and how the "private, public, and mythic spaces" in Nottage's work either "inject and/or dislodge a sense of belonging and identity."2 It is identity and its intersections that are at the core of Nottage's plays, and it is the complexity of those intersections that informs the rich and fruitful palette from which she works.
In Nottage's 2015 play Sweat, two of her principal characters are women. Cynthia, an African American, and her white friend Tracey (racial identities explicitly designated by Nottage) are both line workers at Olstead's, a Reading, Pennsylvania, manufacturing plant. Once secure in their employment, they now face contingent conditions wrought by economic disruption and the constant threat of job layoffs while sharing a sisterly bond and a comradeship that on the surface appears to tran- scend race. As Nottage puts it during a scene where the women move to the beat of the local watering hole's jukebox, Tracey and Cynthia "dance together with the intimacy of close friends who've shared many adventures."3 So too does Tracey's son Jason share a bond with Cynthia's son Chris, who dreams of leaving life on the line to become a teacher. Here is another superficially post-racial friendship, a relationship as brotherly as their mothers' is sisterly. But after Cynthia wins promotion to management and to a job for which Tracey has also applied, both sets of relationships collapse...