Mini-Cast #3 - Sweat by Lynn Nottage

I recently saw a very bad production of a very good new play. I won't say the name of the company. It was full of amateur actors doing their best. Theater's merciless. It exposes every way which actors aren't up to their material, undoing even the best actors, and if the actors are bad enough, it makes the play seem worse. Over time, I've come to learn that performers deserve mercy they rarely got from  me, and particularly actors. Nothing exposes weakness like performing for others, and before we criticize performers, we have to commend them for their bravery. Better a bad production of a good play than no production at all.

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

Is Sweat a great play? ...No. It's a good American play about social issues, in the grand tradition of those from Clifford Odets and Lillian Hellman to Susan Lori-Parks and Bruce Norris. If anything, quite a bit better than many from this tradition. My friend complained that this play's characters weren't characters but ideological mouthpieces. I couldn't disagree, but at least the ideologies were a battle of rights rather than the typical good vs. evil.

For as long as America had theaters, theater is where agitprop flourishes - good is good, evil might as well twirl its mustache. Every problem has a name, and when the villain is invisible, the invisible fates too have names - capitalism, patriarchy, racism, homophobia... All kinds of playwrights try to be political, and they inevitably run into the problem that they know more about theater than politics. For a hundred years, characters on Broadway have made the same sermon about the evils of this or that, capitalism more often than anything else, to make converts of their audiences, but 90% of the audiences already believe everything the dramatist does, and drive home to their Long Island McMansions while the playwright writes his next sermon from his half-a-million dollar brownstone in Williamsburg.

By the time actors get around to noticing ideas, ideas are ready for assisted living. International socialism existed for seventy years before 1928, when the Threepenny Opera hit the theater like a terrorist with a bomb. Before that, class issues were one subject among many that theater discussed. Even Bernard Shaw, the greatest of socialist playwrights, found lots of time for other issues than capitalism. But ever since The Threepenny Opera, theater's most reliable villain is the forces of Capital that wear down the working man to a nub. Some of these plays are very good. Some working in this model could live forever, like Death of a Salesman and Glengarry Glen Ross. It's hard though to escape the idea that class drama hindered the quality of more theater than it helped.

In the same way, the ideas of the Frankfurt School are 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 towering. It also marks the beginning of a new kind of left-oriented play, based not on class but identity.

In the years before Angels, 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, to varying extents, 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 as relevant as it's ever been. But the points have been been made, over, and over again.

This is why I found Sweat so impressively different from the usual fare, because the playwright clearly did her homework. Lynn Nottage spent significant time in Redding Pennsylvania, the American city with the country's highest poverty rate - 40%. She interviewed the entire panoply of residents, and it's quite apparent that she listened because we watch a very modern American story. Yes, there are the usual invisible forces of capitalism driving workers into the ground, but instead of the usual divisions, we see black and white families so bonded that they celebrate every occasion together. The divisions of this America are 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 would work for wages long-rooted Americans find insulting.

While Trump's America reckons with itself about older sins, targets for the worst sins we may yet 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 for better or worse, the two are different. The greatest dramas of a century with weather patterns that uproot whole countries may well be about immigration. May we all live to see them.