Mini-Cast #3 - Sweat by Lynn Nottage - Complete Rough Draft

I saw a very bad production of a very good new 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 is where agitprop goes to flourish - good is good, and evil might as well twirl its mustache. Every problem has a name, and even when the villain is invisible, the invisible fates have names too - capitalism, patriarchy, racism, homophobia... All kinds of playwrights try to be political, and they 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 this or that political force, capitalism more often than anything else, 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 playwright 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. Even Bernard Shaw, the greatest socialist playwright of all time, found lots of time for other issues than capitalism. But ever since The Threepenny Opera, the most reliable villain in the theater is the forces of Capital that wear down the working man to a nub. Some of these plays are very good. Some plays working in this model, like Death of a Salesman and Glengarry Glen Ross, are plays that could live forever. But it's hard to escape the idea that the class drama hindered the quality of more theater than it helped.

Yet in the same way, the ideas of the Frankfurt School have been around since right after World War II - that identities and ideas are 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.

In the years before Angels in America, every play that wasn't trying to be socially responsible portrayed a claustrophobic, dysfunctional family. Eugene O'Neill, Tennessee Williams, and Edward Albee were all masters of it. But after Angels, the two strands combined, and American plays determined that families were dysfunctional because of social forces. And thus we got plays like Topdog/Underdog, How I Learned to Drive, and Clybourne Park.

The idea that politics shapes families is not a new dramatic idea, it goes at least back to Henrik Ibsen, who is overdue in our woke era for a revival. It's a legitimate point of view, and perhaps as relevant as it's ever been. But the points have been been made, over, and over, and over again.

There is plenty more to say about what directions might be alternatives for an American art form that operates like a bastard older brother to the movies and TV. But for today, I'll just say that all of this is why I found Sweat so impressively different from the usual fare, because the playwright clearly did her homework. Apparently Lynn Nottage went into Redding Pennsylvania, the American city with the highest poverty rate in the country - 40%, and interviewed all kinds of residents, and it's incredibly apparent that she listened because we watch a very modern American story. Yes, there were the usual invisible forces of capitalism driving workers into the ground, but instead of the usual divisions, we see black and white families celebrating every occasion together. The divisions of this America is not the divisions of the Wilson era, they are the divisions of the Trump era, when the traditionally poor of America, both black and white, face a gigantic challenge to their livelihoods from even poorer Hispanic immigrants, who will work for wages long-rooted Americans would find unacceptable.

While Trump's America reckons with itself about older sins, targets for the worst sins we may ever commit cross our border every day. Whether or not America reckons properly with the sins of its past, potential sins of our future are howling. Class was the killer of the 19th century, race the killer of the 20th. The great killer of the 21st is not race, it will be immigration, and yes, there's an enormous difference. And the greatest dramas of a century with weather patterns that uproot whole countries will probably be about immigration. May we all live to see them.