Mini-Cast #3: Sweat by Lynn Nottage - Really Rough Incomplete Draft

I saw a very bad production of a very good play last week. I won't say the name of the company, because it was full of amateur actors doing their best. Theater is merciless. It exposes actors who aren't up to their material, even the best actors come undone sometimes, and if the actors are bad enough, it makes the play seem worse. Over time, I've come to learn that performers actors deserve mercy they rarely got from me, and particularly actors. Nothing exposes weaknesses like performing for others, and before performers are criticized, they should be commended for their bravery. Better a bad production of a good play than no production at all.

But it's doubly a shame because I apparently missed a very good production of it last year at Everyman Theater, which is easily the best theater in Baltimore, and nearly the equal of any company in this country of ours where movies are king and 75% of the most talented performers move to Hollywood.

Is Sweat a great play? Well, no. It's a good play about social issues, in the grand tradition of good American plays about social issues from Clifford Odets and Lillian Hellman to Susan Lori-Parks and Bruce Norris. And if anything, it's quite a bit better than many of the plays from this long tradition. My friend complained to me that this play's characters were not characters but mouthpieces for ideologies. I couldn't disagree completely, but at least the ideologies were a battle of rights rather than the usual good versus evil.

For as long as America had theaters, theater's a place where agitprop flourishes - good is good, and evil might as well twirl its mustache. All kinds of playwrights try to be political, and inevitably run into the problem that they know a lot more about theater than about politics. For a hundred years, characters on Broadway have made the same near-religious sermon about the evils of capitalism, ostensibly to make converts of their audiences, but 90% of the audiences already believe in everything the dramatist believes, who then drive home to their Long Island McMansions while the writer writes his next sermon in his half-a-million dollar brownstone in Williamsburg.

By the time actors get around to noticing ideas, the ideas are ready for the nursing home. International socialism existed for seventy years before Bertolt Brecht hit the theater with the Threepenny Opera like a terrorist with a bomb in 1928. Before that, class issues were just one subject among many that theater discussed. But ever since, the most reliable villain is the evils of capitalism that wear down the working man to a nub. Some of these plays are very good. A few playwrights working in this model, like Arthur Miller and Harold Pinter, did great work consistently. But it's hard to escape the idea that the class drama was ultimately a hinderance rather than a help.

 But In the same way, the ideas of the Frankfurt School have been around since right after World War II - that ideas and identities defined by the powerful who shape our world in the image most flattering to them. Angels in America premiered in 1991, and don't misunderstand, however flawed it is, it's still towering. It also marks the beginning of a new kind of leftist play, based not on class but identity.

And this is why I found Sweat so impressive. Yes, there were the usual invisible forces of capitalism, but rather than show villains twirling mustaches, we see

The problems of theater in America are many, but the problems are also the glories. The theater is the most reliable place where American misfits can find acceptance. Sensitive high school kids, bullied by jocks for having no real use for sports, can always find a place for themselves in a high school theater - whether in front of the stage as an actor or behind it as a techie.