Sweat (Sydney Theatre Co) ★★★

Written by Lynn Nottage. Australian Premiere. Sydney Theatre Co. 11 Nov – 22 Dec 2024.

First staged in 2015, but not seen on Broadway till 2017, Lynn Nottage’s Sweat was hailed as an insightful look at working class America (aka Tr*mp voters) by hand-wringing audiences desperate to understand what had happened in the wake of the 2016 election. It is a look at the insidious nature of racism and how the “haves” stay rich by pitting the “have nots” against each other and wouldn’t it be nice if we could all just get along.

Set in a bar in Reading, Pennsylvania, a blue-collar factory town, we watch the fallout of events at a local steel factory. Tracy (Lisa McCune) and her best friend Cynthia (Paula Arundell) have worked side by side on the factory floor all their lives. When the company decides to find a new manager by promoting internally, they both go for the job. Things get more complicated when drastic cost-cutting leads to industrial action, putting the two women on opposite sides of the picket line.

I’ll say this for Nottage’s earnest script, it gives these performers space to really act. Paula Arundell is outstanding as Cynthia, a woman of tough, hardy grit who finds herself in a world of suits and meetings. Lisa McCune uses her innate charm to chart a serious arc for the embittered Tracy, taking her from likable buddy to angry white racist. Deborah Galanos completes the tight trio of friends as Jessie, the permanently drunken sidekick with expert comic timing that never slips into parody. Markus Hamilton also impresses as Brucie, Cynthia’s estranged husband who has already suffered a dehumanising defeat at the hands of his own corporate bosses. Gabriel Alvarado elevates his role of Oscar, the Colombian glassy who works behind the scenes at the bar, saving him from being little more than a plot contrivance. 

Sweat is happy to let scenes, and monologues, linger as it makes its way to its conclusions. Unfortunately those conclusions are rather obvious and their resolution underwhelming. Despite Jeremy Allen’s intricate set (with some excellently integrated lighting moments), the play feels awfully static and flat. Director Zindzi Okenyo (who excelled co-directing Seven Methods of Killing Kylie Jenner and Is God Is) gets great performances from the majority of the cast, but is less successful wrangling the script into shape and making us care. The final physical confrontation is unconvincingly staged, and the closing moments, reaching for poignancy, are undercut by a cringe-worthy revelation and a last line that spoon feeds the audience.

Which isn’t to say there aren’t things I like in the script. The subtle commentary on drug dependency is interesting, but so lightly included it’s easy to overlook the parallels between Black Brucie’s dope smoking and white Tracy’s oxycontin. The circular nature of racial animus, with each new incoming community being hated by those already there. The slow build of Oscar’s character is satisfying to watch, as is the deteriorating relationship between Tracy and Cynthia. But the play lacks a focus as both Tracy and Cynthia take a back seat in the second act (Cynthia literally disappears from the play) and the finale is handed to side characters to deliver.

Sweat has been declared a “masterpiece” and a “thesis on the decline of the working class” but having seen it twice, in two different productions, I honestly just find it to be middling. Not bad, not at all, Nottage’s plotting is tight and her characters can be rich in the hands of the right performers, but I don’t find the play to be particularly revelatory. The big messages about how people turn on each other instead of the power structures above them feels so basic as to be pointless. I had a similar reaction watching Nottage’s Clyde’s at Ensemble last year (thankfully Sweat is mostly spared Clyde’s sickly sit-com faux-sincerity). It’s clear that I personally do not connect with her writing, which does not bode well for the upcoming musical MJ which she wrote the book for. 

Overheard discussion after the show suggests that many people found Sweat to be wonderful and prescient, an interesting slice-of-life. I’m clearly in the minority here and I’ve tried hard to find the gem that so many others see, to no avail. Of the Pulitzer Prize winning plays on Sydney stages right now, STC’s Sweat and Belvoir’s August: Osage County, you can guess which one I’d rewatch last. I might just stop torturing myself and skip Nottage’s next play.