Sweat

Starting with the great Warner Brothers social drama of the '30s, movies used to announce themselves as "Ripped from today's headlines" as a way of showing their relevance, importance, and a whiff of controversy.

"Sweat" takes place in that long patch of Pennsylvania west of the Philly suburbs popularly known as Pennsyltucky. Usually ignored by the coastal chattering classes, the area got a moment in the sun during the presidential campaign for its firm support of Donald Trump.

There's no question in retrospect that "Sweat" benefited from its extremely fortuitous opening last year at the Public Theatre just before the election. "Ripped from today's headlines" recurred in one form or another in every review.

As it happened, an arc of white working-class voters extending from Ohio through Michigan through Wisconsin gave Trump just enough votes to claim the election. Now that we've all finally resolved ourselves to the fact that we're living with this man as our president, the play would appear more relevant than ever.

That must have been the Public's thinking when it decided to transfer "Sweat" to Studio 54 after a highly successful limited run at its theater complex downtown.

Broadway is a whole different animal from the East Village, however. There's the question of whether the tourists who make up the bulk of its audience will want to expend precious cash and time on a feel-bad drama. Even socially conscious New Yorkers may feel a certain sense of burnout on a subject that seemingly went overnight from benign neglect to media (social and mass) obsession.

The setting for "Sweat" is Reading, a hardscrabble city and one of the most corroded in the Rust Belt. As my aunt's family lived there for some years, I know this area somewhat, but even if I had never visited, I would have problems with this play.

A set of interviews with a parole officer frames the play. One black man has turned to religion; the other, to white nationalist extremism. Very intriguing, indeed!

Flash back to a few years ago to the early reign of our last GOP president, George W. Bush. Nottage presents it as a time when workers in the heartland were profoundly ignorant of the devastating effects NAFTA and globalization would have on their lives -- or at least the workers at the plant in Reading that is the focus of the action here.

In this world, not only are two women who work on the factory floor best friends but so are their two sons. This set-up is necessary for the play's denouement, as is the subtle presence of the Latino busboy at the dive bar that's the workers' after-work hangout. (Color me skeptical.)

Beginning with the inevitable rift between the white and black mothers when the latter is bumped up to management, we see cracks forming. The busboy brings attention to a notice in Spanish at a community center that the plant is hiring. Somehow, this has escaped the notice not only of the workers but their union.

Playwright Lynn Nottage, the winner of a Pulitzer Price for Drama, spent a great deal of time there herself, according to the press materials. She recorded people there and I'm sure did prodigious research. Even so, there's always the nagging question of how much self-editing is happening when they're being interviewed.

But the bigger problem is what she did with her material. The dialogue veers uneasily between realistic rough-and-tumble banter that disguises feelings behind its bluntness and elegiac riffs.

Rather than playing down the disconnect, the direction (by Kate Whoriskey) emphasizes it. If ever a play needed overlapping dialogue and interruptions, it's this one.

There's also the problem that too many of these seem placed, rather than arising naturally, never more so than when a white worker who has been brutally dismissive of the busboy opens up to him while they share a cigarette outside the bar.

Nottage seems to be telling us that what happens to these people is emblematic of a feeling of helplessness to control their lives and has made them feel redundant, not only at work but in their own skin.

In the wake of a tumultuous election, there's been a national soul-searching. "Sweat" cuts right to the heart of the matter, and for that, the playwright and producers (like all Broadway shows these days, there's a raft of them) are to be congratulated.

Allowing New York audiences a (literal) front-row seat allows the dilemma these people face to sink in with the immediacy available only in live theater. If "Sweat" is the imperfect vehicle to portray their angst, at least their angst is being portrayed in some way on Broadway.

"Sweat" runs through September 17 at Studio 54, 254 W. 54th St. For tickets or information, call 212-239-6200 or visit www.newyorkcitytheatre.com/theaters/studio54/sweat.php

Steve Weinstein has been a regular correspondent for the International Herald Tribune, the Advocate, the Village Voice and Out. He has been covering the AIDS crisis since the early '80s, when he began his career. He is the author of "The Q Guide to Fire Island" (Alyson, 2007).

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