Sweat

About the show

The play portrays a meeting between a parole officer and two ex-convicts, and three women who were childhood friends and had worked in the same factory. in Reading, Pennsylvania. There are a group of friends that work for the steel factory, named Tracey, Cynthia and Jessie. Tracey is a middle-aged white woman. She loves to hang out at the bar with her friends and she has a gruff kind of humor. She cannot stand the way Reading has been changing over the years. Her friend Cynthia is a black woman who also loves to hang out with her friends at the bar and is a hardworking woman in the factory. She is on and off with her husband, Brucie, who is addicted to drugs. During the play, Cynthia applies and is hired for a managing job at the plant which causes tension. Jessie, another worker at the factory, is not so happy with how her life has turned out and has a problem with alcohol abuse. This is shown in many of the bar scenes. Stan, the bartender, used to work at the plant, but he was injured in a factory accident. Oscar, the busboy at the bar, is Colombian and is not acknowledged often by the patrons. Some characters use xenophobic slurs towards Latinos and show him that he isn't welcome in the Olstead factory. Jason is a white man who is Tracey's son. His best friend is Chris, Cynthia’s son. They both work at the factory and worry that they will be laid off. They both are arrested for assault and are released eight years later. Nottage shifts in time, switching scenes and showing events of eight years earlier. Variety quotes the bartender, Stan, as warning the other characters that "You could wake up tomorrow and all your jobs are in Mexico", to which the characters respond with lethargy and disbelief. Variety described Nottage as going into "the heart of working-class America". Reviews of the play have described the characters as representing blue-collar workers who voted in Donald Trump as president. The play also examines the disintegration of a friendship, after two of the women – one white, one black – apply for the same management job. The latter character gets the position, but soon the company moves jobs to Mexico. The trade union goes on strike, and company management locks out the workers. The management/worker division begins to separate the friends, and racial tensions separate them further.