CANR
WORK TITLE: Sweat
WORK NOTES: Pulitzer Prize for drama, 2017
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1964
WEBSITE: http://www.lynnnottage.net/
CITY: Brooklyn
STATE: NY
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY: American
LAST VOLUME: CANR 209
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born August 10, 1964, in New York, NY; married Tony Gerber (a filmmaker); children: Ruby.
EDUCATION:Brown University, B.A., 1986; Yale School of Drama, M.F.A., 1989; graduated from New Dramatists.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and playwright. Former national press officer for Amnesty International; visiting lecture in playwriting, Yale School of Drama, New Haven, CT, beginning 2000; Columbia School of the Arts, New York, NY, associated professor in the Theatre Department; Market Road Films, Brooklyn, NY, cofounder; artist-in-residence at the Park Avenue Armory, New York, NY. Work-related activities include eveloping original projects for HBO, Sidney Kimmel Entertainment, Showtime, This is That, and Harpo. Serves on the boards of BRIC Arts Media Brooklyn, Donor Direct Action, Dramatist Play Service, Second Stage and the Dramatists Guild; completed a three-year term as an artist trustee on the board of the Sundance Institute.
MEMBER:PEN, Dramatists Guild, Playwrights Horizons, New Dramatists, New York Foundation for the Arts, Writers Guild of America East (WGAE).
AWARDS:Fellowships from Guggenheim Foundation, Manhattan Theatre Club, New Dramatists, and New York Foundation for the Arts; Heideman Award for Ten-Minute Play, Actors Theatre of Louisville, 1993, for Poof!; National Endowment for the Arts/TCG grant for theater residency at Freedom Theatre, Philadelphia, 1999-2000; TCG residency grant, National Endowment for the Arts, for A Walk through Time; AT&T OnStage Award, and Rockefeller grant, both for Las Meninas; New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for Best Play, Outer Critic Circle Award for Best Play, John Gassner Award for Best Playwright, PEN Laura Pels Award for Drama, American Theatre Critics’ Steinberg New Play Award, Francesca Primus Award, AT&T OnStage Award, Audelco Best Playwright award, and four L.A. Ovation Awards, all 2004, all for Intimate Apparel; Off- Broadway Award for playwriting, 2005, for Fabulation; or, The Re-education of Undine; Guggenheim Fellowship, 2005; National Black Theatre Festival August Wilson Playwriting Award, 2005; Woodie Award (St. Louis Black Rep.), 2005; MacArthur “Genius” Grant, 2007; Lucille Lortel Foundation Fellowship, 2007; Whitebird playwriting contest winner; Pulitzer Prize for drama, and Lortel Off-Broadway Play Prize, both 2009, both for Ruined; Master American Dramatist Honor, PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater Awards, 2016; Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, 2016, and Pulitzer Prize for drama, 2017, both for Sweat; Award of Merit Medal, American Academy of Arts and Letters, 2017, for “an outstanding playwright for her body of work.”
WRITINGS
Contributor of a monologue to Our War, first performed at the Arena Stage, New York, NY, 2014; and a vignette to In Your Arms, first performed at the Old Globe, San Diego, 2015. Also author of radio play Maria Rodriguez and the Hare Krishnas and the monologue A … My Name Is Still Alice/Ida Mae Cole Takes a Stance. Author of screenplay The Dew Breakers; coauthor of screenplay Side Streets. Contributor to anthologies. Writer/producer on the Netflix series She’s Gotta Have It.
SIDELIGHTS
Lynn Nottage is a playwright whose work is intended to lend a voice to the experience of the African American woman. As a child growing up in Brooklyn, New York, she began writing plays in her journal. She recalled in an interview posted on the Kentucky Educational Television Web site: “I think for me the journey begins downstairs at the kitchen table of my house. Down there was a gathering place for so many women. To come home from school, and my grandmother would be sitting at the table, and my mother would be sitting at the table. The woman from across the street would be sitting at the table. And they all had stories to tell. They were nurses, teachers; they were activists; they were artists. And I think that is where I got all of my inspiration as a writer.”
Seeking a world beyond Brooklyn, Nottage attended the High School of Music and Art in New York, then went on to Brown University and Yale Drama School. After graduation, she worked as national press officer for Amnesty International and gave up creative writing for some time. Sitting down to work on an entry for a short-play competition, she produced the work Poof! in one sitting. The drama, which deals with abuse against women, won an award, and Nottage decided to rededicate herself to writing plays.
Nottage’s play Mud, River, Stone had its origin in an article the author read about some demobilized soldiers in Mozambique who took hostages because they were never paid for their services. Nottage used the incident as the setting for her drama about an upper-class African American couple who travel to Africa for a second honeymoon. They want to search for their roots, but instead, they find themselves taken hostage. Symbolically, Nottage sought to portray her own search for Africa and its meaning. Back Stage contributor David Sheward wrote that the play starts out as “clever comedy” but declines into “conventional melodrama.” Variety contributor Robert L. Daniels also felt that the play loses focus, but he had praise for the early scenes, in which “the characters are clearly defined, the landscape picturesque, the dialogue laced with humor.” Reflecting on her experience in creating this play, Nottage told the Kentucky Educational Television Web site interviewer: “I most certainly will write more about Africa. I find when I have spare time I read nonfiction books about the Congo. I am fascinated by the Congo, fascinated by the politics of that region and the legacy of colonialism. By the brutality. I think some of that comes out of working at a place like Amnesty International—I studied the abuses of countries. The Congo was one of the most aggressive violators of human rights.”
Crumbs from the Table of Joy, and Other Plays is set during the 1950s and concerns two teenaged girls whose conservative, widowed father moves with them from Florida to New York City, where they all move in with their free-thinking aunt. To their surprise, their father soon comes home with a new wife—a white, German woman. Nottage explained to the Kentucky Educational Television Web site interviewer that she wrote the play in part to try to understand the extreme changes that were taking place in society at that time: “ Crumbs from the Table of Joy, and Other Plays is about a displaced Southern family smack in the center of New York City, in the 1950s, trying to cope with those changes. Coping with integration, trying to cope with big-city ideals with a small- town sensibility.” Reviewing the play for Back Stage, William Stevenson called it “at times moving and at times slow-going,” but concluded: “The action picks up in the second act, with more conflict and a stirring ending.”
In Intimate Apparel Nottage portrays a plain, hard-working seamstress who creates deluxe lingerie for her clients. Although the garments she sews are imaginative and erotic, in her personal life the woman is repressed and has few close relationships. She begins a correspondence with a man working on the Panama Canal, and he eventually comes to New York, where they marry. Their real-life relationship turns out to be very different from what either imagined it would be, and the second act of the play deals with their disappointments and the way they cope with them. Reviewing the play for Hollywood Reporter, Jay Reiner stated that it is a “seemingly simple and straightforward piece of stagecraft that gradually takes on a life and meaning all but impossible to resist.” National Catholic Reporter contributor Retta Blaney described it as “simple yet lovely.”
To research her next play, Ruined, Nottage traveled to Africa. The play is a reimagining of Bertolt Brecht’s classic dramatic work Mother Courage. Nottage’s title, however, refers to the systemic rape of women in Africa as an act of war, and also of the genital mutilation that African women are subject to. In Ruined, Nottage examines the hardships suffered by a brothel filled with Congolese women. The house mother of the brothel, Mama Nadi, oversees the comings and goings of various wayward clients, such as miners and soldiers. The protagonist, Salima, joins the brothel after being raped by soldiers. She sees the protection provided by the brothel as a means to escape further assault. Discussing the play’s connection to Mother Courage with Nottage in the New York Times, Celia McGee wrote that “one of the first things Ms. Nottage was able to jettison by developing her own conception rather than staging a version of Brecht’s was the ‘kind of distancing Brecht strove for from his audience so he could engage it intellectually.’” Nottage also told McGee: “I believe in engaging people emotionally, because I think they react more out of emotion. … It was important that this not become a documentary, or agitprop. And that Mama Nadi is morally ambiguous, that you’re constantly shifting in your response to her.”
Nottage additionally spoke of her inspiration with Patrick Pacheco in the Los Angeles Times. “Nottage’s original concept was to update … Brecht’s drama of a stoic 17th century European profiteer. Yet once stateside, she fretted that the idea was no longer valid,” Pacheco wrote. “The stories she heard demanded their own context, the specific world of the Congo. Yes, with its Brechtian opportunists but also poets and singers. As such, she was also determined to avoid the ‘pornography’ she thinks has pervaded much of the Western press’ reporting on Africa: the exploitive and exclusive picture of a continent lashed with intractable despair, poverty and violence,” Pacheco added. Nottage then told Pacheco: “There was no way I was going to write about Africa and not include the triumphant continuity of life that had also been part of my experience there. It’s not just war and famine all the time. … I knew that the audience would have to hear the horrific stories. But I didn’t want to be sensationalistic.”
The play was universally acclaimed, garnering extensive play runs and a 2009 Pulitzer Prize. Applauding Ruined in America, Rob Weinert-Kendt wrote that “a play as strong and serious as Ruined … can make us powerfully feel its characters’ suffering—but it is a suffering that would be unbearable if it were not shared in the intense intimacy of a theater.” Weinert-Kendt commented, however, that just because the message is encountered “while registering a collective twinge of virtual sympathy … it would be a mistake to dismiss the social and, yes, even political impact of a work like Ruined. ” Another glowing review was proffered by David Rooney in Variety, and he remarked that “in Lynn Nottage’s emotionally scorching new play, it’s impossible to look away. Ruined takes us inside an unthinkable reality and into the heads of victims and perpetrators to create a full-immersion drama of shocking complexity and moral ambiguity.” Rooney went on to note: “It’s love and humanity that give this stirring play its vitality. Nottage’s achievement is that without in any way trivializing a political situation fraught with injustice, she has crafted a work that speaks eloquently of the monstrous acts bred by war, and of the courage and compromises required to survive them.” Observing that “Nottage has crafted a humanist expose,” American Theater contributor Randy Gener found that “although Lynn Nottage would be the first to fess up that Mama Nadi, the proud and exploitative protagonist of her woundingly eloquent Ruined, owes her inspiration to Brecht’s heroine, that link is mainly academic.”
Commenting on the plight of Nottage’s characters in the online On the Issues, Alexis Greene wrote: “Nottage does not glorify prostitution. If prostitution, as Nottage indicates, offers a choice for the women of Ruined, the choice is the most basic one of whether to live or die. Prostitution becomes an ironic kind of haven for these women. They are not being raped by soldiers with bayonets, but, as Salima says, their bodies are still battle zones.” Greene added: “To Salima, the difference between prostituting herself under Mama Nadi’s roof and being raped in the bush has become minimal. There is little consent on her part, and great suffering, in either case.” Scott Brown stated in New York: “The playwright leads us into the heart of darkness, then plays us a song that says things just might be all right, that we can do better if we keep the faith.”
Explaining her mission to the interviewer for the Kentucky Educational Television Web site, Nottage said: “I think that the African-American woman’s voice is important because it is part of the American voice. But you would not know that by looking at TV or films. You would think that we do not exist. And part of my mission as a writer is to say, ‘I do exist. My mother existed, and my grandmother existed, and my great-grandmother existed, and they had stories that are rich, complicated, funny, that are beautiful and essential.’ And the stories have become the myth of America. … I want people to know that my story, that of the African-American woman, is also the American story.”
Nottage received her second Pulitzer Prize in 2017 for her play Sweat. The play revolves around the the disappearance of manufacturing jobs in the United States and the effect a factory closing has on the play’s characters. Noting that the title of play, “refers to the hard labor that its characters have put in for decades,” New York Times Online contributor Charles Isherwood, went on to comment: “But members of the audience may find themselves getting a little moist with anxiety as this extraordinarily moving drama hurtles toward its conclusion with the awful inevitability of Greek tragedy.”
The play takes place in a neighborhood bar in the factory town of Reading Pennsylvania. The bar has been a longtime hangout for people who have worked in a local factory. The play’s primary characters are the bar’s owner, Stan, and three friends: Tracey, Cynthia, and Jessie, who work on a factory line together. All three seem to be content to work at their factory jobs and have no expectations, except for Cynthia, who ends up getting a supervisor job. Bar owner Stan, however, who keeps up with the latest news, realizes that the factory may be closing. Although Stan warns his patrons of the potential that their jobs may soon be going to Mexico, his patrons refuse to acknowledge the possibility even though the signs are becoming clear.
“Nottage wrote Sweat after extensive interviews with people in Reading, which accounts for the solid character work and stretches of realistic dialogue,” wrote Variety Online contributor Marilyn Stasio. Writing for Newsday Online, Linda Winer remarked: “In a way, this feels like a throwback to Depression-era drama,” going on in the same review to note the play’s “conventional structure,” adding: “The relationships are so multilayered, the economic and cruel racial realities so clear that fancier stagecraft might just get in the way.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
America, July 20, 2009, Rob Weinert-Kendt, “A War on Women: Lynn Nottage’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Ruined,” p. 35.
American Theatre, November, 1995, Michael Barnwell, review of Por’knockers, p. 10; September 1, 2007, “Lynn Nottage and Luis Valdez,” p. 19; March 1, 2009, Randy Gener, “Mama Nadi and Her Women,” p. 21; July 1, 2009, “Tops in NYC”; September 1, 2009, “New from TCG Books,” p. 8.
America’s Intelligence Wire, April 9, 2009, “Gripping Portraits of Sexual Violence in Play”; May 4, 2009, “Ruined Gets Top Lortel Off-Broadway Play Prize”; June 23, 2009, “Mixed Blood to Do Pulitzer Prize-winning Ruined in New Season.”
Back Stage, June 30, 1995, William Stevenson, review of Crumbs from the Table of Joy, and Other Plays, p. 36; December 8, 1995, David A. Rosenberg, review of Por’knockers, p. 40; December 19, 1997, David Sheward, review of Mud, River, Stone, p. 33; December 1, 2000, Mark S.P. Turvin, review of Crumbs from the Table of Joy, and Other Plays, p. 7; March 26, 2004, Roger Armbrust, “Lynn Nottage Wins Primus Award,” p. 4; February 12, 2009, David Sheward, review of Ruined, p. 10.
Back Stage West, February 15, 2001, Charlene Baldridge, review of Crumbs from the Table of Joy, and Other Plays, p. 14.
Daily Variety, April 12, 2004, Charles Isherwood, review of Intimate Apparel, p. 12; May 26, 2004, Robert Hofler, “Taper Dons New ‘Apparel,’” p. 5; November 18, 2008, Steven Oxman, review of Ruined, p. 43; February 11, 2009, David Rooney, review of Ruined, p. 2; May 19, 2009, “Obies Spread the Love: Nods Fete Clutch of Shows, Thesps,” p. 3; July 2, 2009, “Pulitzer Prize-winning Play Ruined Has Extended for the Last Time, with the Show Now Running at Manhattan Theater Club’s Off-Broadway Space through Sept. 6,” p. 3.
ONLINE
Brooklyn Rail, http://www.thebrooklynrail.org/ (September 2, 2005), Sonya Sobieski, interview with Lynn Nottage.
Culture Vulture, http://www.culturevulture.net/ (September 2, 2005), review of Intimate Apparel.
Deadline, http://deadline.com/ April 10, 2017, Jeremy Gerard, “Lynn Nottag’s Sweat Wins 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Drama; Criticism Prize Goes to Hilton Als of the New Yorker.“
Kentucky Educational Television Web site, http://www.ket.org/ (September 2, 2005), “A Talk with Playwright Lynn Nottage.”
Los Angeles Times Online, Lynn Nottage on her Pulitzer Win for Drama: ‘I’m Representing for Women.'”
Lynn Nottage Home Page, http://www.lynnnottage.com (June 6, 2017).
New Dramatists Web site, http:// www.newdramatists.org/ (September 1, 2005), biographical information about Lynn Nottage.
Newsday Online, http://www.newsday.com/ (March 26, 2017), Linda Winer, “Sweat Review: Lynn Nottage Gives Intimate Glimpse of Lost Factory Life.”
New York Times Online, https://www.nytimes.com/ (August 16, 2015), Charles Isherwood, “Review: Lynn Nottage’s Sweat Examines Lives Unraveling by Industry’s Demise.”
On the Issues, http://www.ontheissuesmagazine.com/ (November 13, 2009), Alexis Greene, review of Ruined.
Playbill Online, http://www.playbill.com/ (April 10, 2017), Olivia Clement, “Lynn Nottage’s Sweat Wins Pulitzer Prize for Drama.”
Steppenwolf Backstage Online, http: //www.steppenwolf.org/ (September 2, 2005), Alyson Roux, “Lynn Nottage at Steppenwolf,” review of Intimate Apparel.
Variety Online, http://variety.com/ (March 26, 2017), Marilyn Stasio, “Broadway Review: Lynn Nottage’s Timely Drama Sweat“;(April 10, 2017), Gordon Cox, “Lynn Nottage Wins Her Second Pulitzer Prize for Broadway’s Sweat.”
Washington Post Online, https://www.washingtonpost.com/ (March 26, 2017), Peter Marks, “Blue-Collar Drama Sweat Marks the Broadway Debut of Pulitzer-Winning Playwright Lynn Nottage.”*
Lynn Nottage is a Pulitzer Prize winning playwright and a screenwriter. Her plays have been produced widely in the United States and throughout the world. Sweat (Pulitzer Prize, Susan Smith Blackburn Prize) moved to Broadway after a sold out run at The Public Theater. It premiered and was commissioned by Oregon Shakespeare Festival American Revolutions History Cycle/Arena Stage, By The Way, Meet Vera Stark (Lilly Award, Drama Desk Nomination), Ruined (Pulitzer Prize, OBIE, Lucille Lortel, New York Drama Critics’ Circle, Audelco, Drama Desk, and Outer Critics Circle Award), Intimate Apparel (American Theatre Critics and New York Drama Critics’ Circle Awards for Best Play), Fabulation, or The Re-Education of Undine (OBIE Award), Crumbs from the Table of Joy, Las Meninas, Mud, River, Stone, Por’knockers and POOF!. In addition, she is working with composer Ricky Ian Gordon on adapting her play Intimate Apparel into an opera (commissioned by The Met/LCT). She is also developing This is Reading a performance installation based on two years of interviews set to open at the Franklin Street, Reading Railroad Station in Reading, PA in July. She is currently an artist-in-residence at the Park Avenue Armory.
She is the co-founder of the production company, Market Road Films, whose most recent projects include The Notorious Mr. Bout directed by Tony Gerber and Maxim Pozdorovkin (Premiere/Sundance 2014), First to Fall directed by Rachel Beth Anderson (Premiere/ IDFA, 2013) and Remote Control (Premiere/Busan 2013- New Currents Award) Over the years, she has developed original projects for HBO, Sidney Kimmel Entertainment, Showtime, This is That and Harpo. She is writer/producer on the Netflix series She's Gotta Have It directed by Spike Lee.
Nottage is the recipient of a PEN/Laura Pels Master Playwright Award, Literature Award from The Academy of Arts and Letters,
Columbia University Provost Grant, Doris Duke Artist Award, The Joyce Foundation Commission Project & Grant,
Madge Evans-Sidney Kingsley Award, MacArthur "Genius Grant" Fellowship, Steinberg "Mimi" Distinguished Playwright Award, Nelson A. Rockefeller Award for Creativity, The Dramatists Guild Hull-Warriner Award, the inaugural Horton Foote Prize,Helen Hayes Award, the Lee Reynolds Award, and the Jewish World Watch iWitness Award. Her other honors include the National Black Theatre Fest's August Wilson Playwriting Award, a Guggenheim Grant, Lucille Lortel Fellowship and Visiting Research Fellowship at Princeton University. She is a graduate of Brown University and the Yale School of Drama. She is also an Associate Professor in the Theatre Department at Columbia School of the Arts.
Nottage is a board member for BRIC Arts Media Bklyn, Donor Direct Action, Dramatist Play Service, Second Stage and the Dramatists Guild. She recently completed a three-year term as an Artist Trustee on the Board of the Sundance Institute. She is member of the The Dramatists Guild and WGAE
Lynn Nottage
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Lynn Nottage
Lynn Nottage Square portrait Shankbone (cropped).JPG
Born November 2, 1964 (age 52)
Brooklyn, New York, United States
Occupation Playwright, professor lecturer
Alma mater Brown University
Yale School of Drama
Spouse Tony Gerber
Child(ren) 2
Information
Magnum opus Ruined
Awards Pulitzer Prize for Drama (2009, 2017)
Obie Award
Lynn Nottage (born November 2, 1964) is an American playwright whose work often deals with the lives of women of African descent. She is an associate professor of theater at Columbia University and a lecturer in playwriting at the Yale School of Drama.
She won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2009 for Ruined. She won the 2016 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2017 for Sweat. This made her the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama twice.[1][2]
Contents
1 Life
2 Early life
3 Career
3.1 Plays
3.2 Sweat
3.3 Other
4 Themes
5 Honors
6 Works
7 References
8 External links
Life
Nottage was born in Brooklyn and is a graduate of Saint Ann's School, Brown University, and the Yale School of Drama. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2005, and a MacArthur Grant in 2007.[3]
Nottage is married to filmmaker Tony Gerber, with whom she has two children, Ruby and Melkamu Gerber.
Early life
Born in Brooklyn on November 2, 1964 to a schoolteacher and a child psychologist, Nottage attended New York's High School of Music & Art and Saint Ann's School.[4] Inspired by school productions of Annie and The Wiz, she penned her first play, The Darker Side of Verona, which told the story of an African American Shakespearean company. After attending Brown University and the Yale School of Drama, Nottage worked in Amnesty International's press office for four years.[5]
Career
She is the co-founder of the production company, Market Road Films, whose most recent projects include The Notorious Mr. Bout, directed by Tony Gerber and Maxim Pozdorovkin (Premiere/Sundance 2014); First to Fall, directed by Rachel Beth Anderson (Premiere/ IDFA, 2013); and Remote Control (Premiere/Busan 2013-New Currents Award). Over the years, she has developed original projects for HBO, Sidney Kimmel Entertainment, Showtime, This is That, and Harpo Productions.[6]
Nottage's plays have been produced Off-Broadway and regionally by The Acting Company, Actors Theatre of Louisville, Alliance Theatre Company, Arena Stage, Capital Repertory Theatre, City Theatre, Crossroads Theatre, Playwrights Horizons, Manhattan Theatre Club, San Jose Repertory Theatre, Second Stage Theatre, Steppenwolf Theatre Company, Vineyard Theatre, Yale Repertory Theatre, The Guthrie, among others.
Plays
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One of her best-known plays is Intimate Apparel, co-commissioned and produced at Baltimore's Center Stage, where it premiered in February 2003 and South Coast Repertory. It was highly acclaimed in its Off-Broadway production in 2004, starring Viola Davis. She wrote a companion piece to Intimate Apparel, the OBIE award-winning Fabulation, or the Re-Education of Undine, which is set 100 years later. The West Coast premiere of her Crumbs from the Table of Joy, at South Coast Repertory, earned two NAACP Theatre Awards for performance.
Nottage's play, Ruined, dramatizes the plight of Congolese women surviving civil war. It premiered in 2007 in the Goodman Theater (Chicago) New Stages Series, and transferred to Off-Broadway at the Manhattan Theatre Club. Ruined was awarded the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Nottage was a finalist for the 2009 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize for Ruined.[7] Her other plays include the children’s musical, A Walk Through Time; Mud, River, Stone (Blackburn Prize finalist); Por’knockers; and Las Meninas.[citation needed]
Her play Poof! (Heideman Award) was broadcast on PBS in 2002, with the cast that featured Rosie Perez and Viola Davis.[8][9] It was initially presented in 1993 at the Actors Theatre Of Louisville (Louisville, Kentucky) during the Humana Festival of New American Plays.[10][11]
Her play By the Way, Meet Vera Stark premiered Off-Broadway at Second Stage Theatre on May 9, 2011 with direction by Jo Bonney, and received rave reviews.[12] The play is a "funny and irreverent look at racial stereotypes in Hollywood."[13] The play was nominated for the 2012 Drama Desk Award, Outstanding Play. The play ran at the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles in September 2012, starring Sanaa Lathan, who played the role of the maid who becomes a stage star.[14]
Nottage contributed to the "dance-theatre musical" written Stephen Flaherty and Lynn Ahrens titled In Your Arms which premiered at the Old Globe Theatre, San Diego, in September 2015. The piece consists of ten vignettes and was directed and choreographed by Christopher Gattelli. Her vignette is titled A Wedding Dance and was performed by Marija Juliette Abney and Adesola Osakalumi with The Company.[15]
Sweat
Main article: Sweat (play)
She received a commission from Oregon Shakespeare Festival and the Arena Stage. The play that she wrote as a result, Sweat, was presented at the festival in Ashland, Oregon during July 29, 2015 to October 31, 2015 and directed by Kate Whoriskey.[16][17] The play takes place in Reading, Pennsylvania, and involves steel workers who have been locked out of their factory workplace.[18] The play was produced at the Arena Stage (Washington, DC) from January 15, 2016 to February 21, 2016, directed by Kate Whoriskey.[19] Nottage won the 2015-16 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize for this play.[20][21][22][23] Sweat premiered Off-Broadway at the Public Theater on October 18, 2016 (previews), officially on November 3, again directed by Whoriskey. The play closed on December 18, 2016.[24][25][26] Sweat opened on Broadway at Studio 54 on March 4, 2017 in previews, officially on March 26, 2017. This marks the Broadway debut of a Nottage play.[27] The Broadway cast features the Off-Broadway cast, with the exception of the role of Jessie, played by Alison Wright.[28]
Sweat was a finalist for the 2016 Edward M. Kennedy Prize for Drama.[29][30] Sweat was again a finalist for the 2017 Edward M. Kennedy Prize for Drama Inspired by American History. The award is administered by Columbia University.[31][32] The play won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
Other
Nottage reading at Occupy Wall Street, November 2011
On May 13, 2009, Nottage spoke at a public reception in Washington, DC following a United States Senate Foreign Relations joint subcommittee hearing entitled "Confronting Rape and Other Forms of Violence Against Women in Conflict Zones," with case studies on the Democratic Republic of Congo and Sudan.[33]
Themes
The Guardian noted: "Nottage’s...work has garnered praise for bringing challenging and often forgotten, stories onto the stage. ... Ruined explored the use of rape as a weapon against women in the Democratic Republic of Congo, while Intimate Apparel focused on a lonely black seamstress working in New York in 1905....Future areas the 51-year-old is keen to explore in her plays includes the American prison industrial complex, which is “destroying the lives of so many men of colour” but is barely talked about in the national conversation or on the stage. Yet Nottage also expressed disappointment that her work was constantly defined by both her own race and gender, unlike her white male counterparts."[34]
Honors
Nottage has been awarded the 2017 Award of Merit Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, for "an outstanding playwright for her body of work". [35]
Nottage has been named a Residency One Playwright for the 2018–19 season by the Signature Theatre Company. The program "involves an intensive exploration of the writer’s body of work."[36]
She won the 2016 PEN/Laura Pels Award, Master American Dramatist.[37][38]
She has been awarded playwriting fellowships from Manhattan Theatre Club, New Dramatists, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. She is also the recipient of a Playwrights Horizons Amblin/Dreamworks commission and a National Endowment for the Arts/Theatre Communications Group grant for a year-long residency at Freedom Repertory Theater in Philadelphia. Nottage is an alumnus of New Dramatists. In 2010, she was awarded the Steinberg Distinguished Playwright Award, which includes a prize of $200,000.[39]
In announcing the MacArthur Fellowship for 2007, the foundation said: "Lynn Nottage is an original voice in American theater..."[3]
She received the Guggenheim Grant, Drama and Performance Art, in 2005.[40] She received the PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater Award for a playwright in mid-career in 2004.
She was a finalist for the 2001 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize for Mud, River, Stone.[41]
Works
Poof (1993)[42]
Crumbs from the Table of Joy (1995)
Por'Knockers (1995)[43]
Mud, River, Stone (1997)[44]
Las Meninas (2002)[45]
Intimate Apparel (2003)
Fabulation, or the Re-Education of Undine (2004)
Ruined (2008)
By the Way, Meet Vera Stark (2011)[46]
Our War (2014)[47]
In Your Arms (2015)
Sweat (2015)
Lynn Nottage’s Sweat Wins Pulitzer Prize for Drama
By Olivia Clement
Apr 10, 2017
Lynn Nottage is the first female playwright to receive the prestigious award for the second time.
Lynn Nottage and Kate Whoriskey Lynn Nottage Marc J. Franklin
Lynn Nottage’s play Sweat, a personal and political drama exploring America’s industrial decline, has been named the recipient of the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Nottage makes history as the first female playwright to win the prestigious award twice, having won previously for Ruined in 2009.
Nottage says that she wasn’t listening out for the winners of the Pulitzer Prize on April 9, and was just “chilling at home in Brooklyn” when she received a call from a journalist informing her of her win. “I’m in great company,” she tells Playbill, of joining the likes of legendary playwrights Tennessee Williams and Eugene O'Neill, who have won the Pulitzer on more than one occasion.
Sweat, directed by Kate Whoriskey, tells the story of a group of friends who have spent their lives working together on the factory floor. When rumors of layoffs begin to stir, rifts form, chipping away at their trust and pitting them against each other. The production opened on Broadway at Studio 54 on March 26.
The production marks the Broadway playwriting debut for Nottage. The playwright says that in order to dismantle the “white male gaze” that has dominated the stage, it's necessary to see more female voices represented. “I love being a woman and I love being a woman of color,” says the playwright, who hopes that Sweat will encourage more diverse audiences to Broadway.
Nominated as finalists in Drama in 2017 were Sarah DeLappe’s The Wolves and Taylor Mac’s A 24-Decade History of Popular Music. The jury for the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Drama included Elysa Gardner (Entertainment Critic, USA Today), Pulitzer-winning playwright Annie Baker (The Flick), Jesse Green (Theater Critic and Contributing Editor, New York), Jonathan Kalb (Professor of Theatre, Hunter College, CUNY), and Wendy Rosenfield (Theater Critic, Philadelphia Inquirer).
Read More: HOW BROADWAY’S SWEAT BECAME AN AWARD-WINNING PLAY
Sweat_Production_Photo_Broadway_2017_12_HR.jpg John Earl Jelks, James Colby, Michelle Wilson, Johanna Day, and Alison Wright Joan Marcus
The play was co-commissioned by the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and D.C.’s Arena Stage; it received its world premiere at OSF in July 2015 and subsequently played an acclaimed run at Arena Stage in January 2016. Sweat debuted in New York at the Public Theater in November 2016, and following critical acclaim, was extended three times. It is also the recipient of the 2016 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize.
Other playwrights to win the Pulitzer Prize numerous times are: Williams (Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, 1955, and A Streetcar Named Desire, 1948), O'Neill (Beyond the Horizon, 1920, Anna Christie, 1922, Strange Interlude, 1928, Long Day's Journey Into Night, 1957), Robert E. Sherwood (Idiots Delight, 1936, Abe Lincoln in Illinois, 1939, There Shall Be No Night, 1941), Thornton Wilder (Our Town, 1938, and The Skin of Our Teeth, 1943), Edward Albee (A Delicate Balance, 1967, Seascape, 1975, Three Tall Women 1994), and August Wilson (Fences, 1987, and The Piano Lesson, 1990).
Lynn Nottage Wins Her Second Pulitzer Prize for Broadway’s ‘Sweat’
Legit Editor
Gordon Cox
Legit Editor @GCoxVariety
Lynn Nottage
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April 10, 2017 | 12:43PM PT
Current Broadway play “Sweat” has scored playwright Lynn Nottage her second Pulitzer Prize for Drama, with the award this year going to a show that has proven a timely look at a group of working-class friends in a declining factory town.
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Nottage, who conducted interviews and research into the declining community of Reading, Penn., as inspiration for the play, previously picked up the 2009 drama Pulitzer for “Ruined,” her drama set in the Congo. Also among the list of Pulitzer winners was New Yorker theater critic Hilton Als, winning the award for criticism, as well as Colson Whitehead’s “The Underground Railroad,” bagging the fiction prize.
The two finalists for the drama prize were “The Wolves,” Sarah DeLappe’s bracing story of a girl’s soccer team, and “A 24-Decade History of Popular Music,” Taylor Mac’s ambitious, 24-hour cycle of American musical throughout the nation’s lifespan. But “Sweat” scored the top prize for a play that, following its 2015 debut at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and an early 2016 run in Washington, D.C., arrived in New York just as last year’s contentious presidential election added new urgency to the play’s depiction of economic decline, racism and the overlooked working class.
The win for “Sweat” looks poised to draw additional attention — and additional business — to the Broadway production of the title, which has posted modest weekly grosses since it began performances March 4. Given her “Ruined” win, Nottage has some insight into how a Pulitzer win can affect the response to a play.
“It created a larger audience for ‘Ruined,’” she noted after the awards announcement. “People leaned in to some of the issues in a way that they hadn’t prior. The Pulitzer is such a conversation starter, and this time around I feel really equipped to talk about the issues in the play.”
In addition to awards for letters, drama and music, the Putlizer board handed out journalism prizes to news organizations including the New York Times (which won three), the Washington Post and the Chicago Tribune, among others.
Lynn Nottage on her Pulitzer win for drama: 'I’m representing for women'
Lynn Nottage
Lynn Nottage, winner of her second Pulitzer Prize for drama. (Al Seib / Los Angeles Times)
Jessica GeltJessica GeltContact Reporter
Reached by phone Monday after earning the Pulitzer Prize for drama, “Sweat” playwright Lynn Nottage was clear on exactly whom she was representing with the win.
“No. 1, I’m representing for women, and No. 2, I’m representing for playwrights of color,” said Nottage, whose “Sweat” won acclaim as a thoughtful examination of the working-class anger that led to the election of President Trump.
The Pulitzer jury characterized the work as “a nuanced yet powerful drama that reminds audiences of the stacked deck still facing workers searching for the American dream.”
For Nottage, an associate professor of theater at Columbia University, the win Monday marked her second Pulitzer. In 2009 she won for her play “Ruined.”
No. 1, I’m representing for women, and No. 2, I’m representing for playwrights of color. — Lynn Nottage
“Winning the second Pulitzer firmly places me in conversation with this culture,” Nottage said.
“Sweat” has its origins in the Occupy Wall Street movement that sprang to life in New York City in 2011. Nottage became intrigued by the story of the 99% calling the status of the 1% into question, and she went in search of a place that she felt was representative of the culture as a whole.
She found that place in Reading, Pa., a manufacturing town that has suffered from the effects of globalization, and “Sweat” was born out of Nottage’s intensive interviews with residents. The play mostly takes place in a blue-collar bar in 2000 when the effects of NAFTA are beginning to take hold. It jumps to 2008, when the economic crash delivers a body blow.
“In part the success of the play has been that even though it’s happening in 2000, it’s still very much about America today,” said Nottage, although she added that nobody could predict the groundswell of angst that came to play during the 2016 presidential election.
“I don’t think any of us could predict Trump. Trump is the stuff of nightmares,” Nottage said. “But in talking to people, I knew there was a tremendous level of disaffection and anger and sorrow. I know people felt misrepresented and voiceless.”
Michelle Wilson, left, James Colby and Johanna Day in "Sweat" at the Public Theater.
Michelle Wilson, left, James Colby and Johanna Day in "Sweat" at the Public Theater. (Joan Marcus)
“Sweat,” directed by Kate Whoriskey, first appeared at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland in 2015. It premiered off-Broadway at the Public Theater in October 2016, and it began previews at Studio 54 on Broadway last month.
In his review of “Sweat” at the Public, Los Angeles Times theater critic Charles McNulty noted: “Nottage isn't simply writing to explain the behavior of a certain segment of Donald Trump voters. She's analyzing the way economic pressures and changing demographics have, as this election has dismayingly shown us, pitted communities against one another.”
Nottage said she wrote the play to build bridges and an environment of empathy. She has been working on a multimedia art installation to be unveiled in July in the long-abandoned Franklin Street Railroad Station in Reading. “This Is Reading” weaves individual stories into a cohesive tale of the city.
The Pulitzer finalists in the drama category were “The Wolves” by Sarah DeLappe, which used a girls high school soccer team as a springboard to examine the creation of identity; and “A 24-Decade History of Popular Music” by Taylor Mac, who employed music to plumb the depths of racism, sexism and homophobia.
In the Pulitzer’s music category, Du Yun won for her opera “Angel’s Bone,” which premiered in January 2016 at the Prototype Festival, 3LD Art & Technology Center in New York. The Pulitzer jury described the piece as “a bold operatic work that integrates vocal and instrumental elements and a wide range of styles into a harrowing allegory for human trafficking in the modern world.”
Lynn Nottage’s ‘Sweat’ Wins 2017 Pulitzer Prize For Drama; Criticism Prize Goes To Hilton Als of The New Yorker
by Jeremy Gerard
April 10, 2017 12:45pm
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Lynn Nottage won her second Pulitzer Prize for Drama today, winning the award for Sweat, a drama set in a Pennsylvania factory town ravaged by changing economics and the social forces that culminated with the November election of Donald Trump. The play, staged by Kate Whoriskey, opened earlier this month on Broadway.
“Sharp and threatening as a box cutter blade, Lynn Nottage’s drama Sweat opened last fall at the Public Theater shortly before the election, an unnervingly prescient reality check even before Donald Trump’s victory,” I wrote in the review for Deadline. “‘No play in recent memory has shed more light on the crises and tribulations of America’s great retrenched working middle class,’ I wrote then, and that remains true these five tumultuous months later.”
In 2009, Nottage won the prize for her play Ruined, about the enforced sexual slavery of women during the civil war in the Republic of Congo.
Lynn Nottage
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“I’m excited that I can bring the conversation which is necessary to the main stage,” Notttage told Deadline this afternoon in a telephone interview after the announcement. “The economic devastation affecting the culture as a whole and raising awareness for some folks who were reluctant to engage in this conversation.”
Asked about the response she’s seen from audiences, Nottage said, “From my point of view, the audience reaction has been tremendous. The curtain comes down and they’re hit for a moment, which is as I wanted it to be – a dialogue starter that then people could conjure with. Reading is a bedrock of our culture being destroyed.”
Sweat marks the second Pulitzer for a playwright committed to art as a vehicle for social awareness. “I hold onto Werner Herzog’s notion that the job of the artist is to keep your eyes open when everyone else’s are shut. sometimes what you see is beautiful and sometimes it’s ugly, and the artist shouldn’t be afraid to hold that mirror.”
The Pulitzer Prize for criticism was awarded for the second year in a row to a critic from The New Yorker magazine. The recipient is drama critic Hilton Als. Last year, the criticism award went to television critic Emily Nussbaum. The 2016 prizes marked the first time the awards, which were established to honor daily newspaper print journalism, were opened up to magazine journalists.
Mike Pride, administrator of the Pulitzers, began the announcements this afternoon from Columbia University with an Oscars joke, ad libbing, “Just making sure I have the right envelope.”
The Pulitzers are the most coveted awards in print and, more recently, online journalism and among the most coveted in the arts; this year the cash value of the prizes was raised to $15,000 from $10,000. The top journalism award, the Gold Medal for Public Service, was awarded to the New York Daily News and Pro Publica, an independent investigative group that works with established papers, for a series on the NYPD’s use of a decades-old law to force people from their homes and businesses over alleged illegal activity.
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Blue-collar drama ‘Sweat’ marks the Broadway debut of Pulitzer-winning playwright Lynn Nottage
By Peter Marks March 26
From left foreground, in “Sweat”: Johanna Day, Michelle Wilson and Alison Wright, with Carlo Alban in background (Joan Marcus)
NEW YORK — In “Sweat,” playwright Lynn Nottage bottles a flammable brand of white working-class resentment and spills it, in its superheated state, all over the stage of Broadway’s Studio 54.
Audiences will readily recognize the vitriol unleashed in Nottage’s timely if too plodding drama, which had its official opening Sunday night: It’s the same streak of embittered disenfranchisement in the nation’s faltering industrial belt that Donald Trump exploited to his advantage. Set in the economically stressed environs of Reading, Pa., in 2000 (and 2008), the play makes a case study out of the decline of a steel bearings plant, revealing how lives are disrupted, and ethnic and racial hatreds are stoked in the wake of a factory owner’s decision to shut down the plant and ship manufacturing jobs to another country.
You have to credit Nottage for prescience: She was researching her play — which premiered at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in 2015 and later made stops at Arena Stage in Washington and off-Broadway’s Public Theater — well before the election results identified a magnitude of disaffection caused by economic stagnation that many observers in the media and politics underestimated. That boiling sense of grievance is embodied most pointedly by Johanna Day’s Tracey, a white factory worker whose family goes back generations in the plant. Looking for scapegoats after union members are locked out, volatile Tracey turns sullenly on her recently promoted black best friend Cynthia (Michelle Wilson), and then more malevolently on Oscar (Carlo Alban), a young Latino man recruited by the company to replace the locked-out employees.
Nottage, a Pulitzer Prize winner for “Ruined,” her play cataloging the barbaric acts committed against women during an African civil war, is once again exploring a community convulsed to the breaking point by forces out of its control. Although the drama is essentially the reconstruction of events leading up to a brutal encounter in a Reading bar that lands a pair of young factory workers (portrayed by Will Pullen and Khris Davis) in prison, its best moments anatomize the friendship among three women in the plant: Tracey, Cynthia and their barfly work pal Jessie (the terrific Alison Wright). How their camaraderie disintegrates is a far more nuanced bit of storytelling than the standard-issue crime-procedural track that “Sweat” ultimately shifts onto.
Day is the single holdover from the cast in the Arena production, which also retains both its original director, Kate Whoriskey, and design team, for Broadway. The actress brings a bombastic flair to blue-collar Tracey that makes believable her spite-driven, alcohol-fueled egging on of the attack in the bar. The other actors are all fine, although the same could be said for the Arena ensemble. Of “Sweat,” the very best that can be said is that it nobly alerts theatergoers to the plight of hard-pressed Americans — who might be unable to afford tickets to the play themselves.
Sweat, by Lynn Nottage. Directed by Kate Whoriskey. Set, John Lee Beatty; costumes, Jennifer Moeller; lighting, Peter Kaczorowski; sound, Rob Milburn and Michael Bodeen; projections, Jeff Sugg; production stage manager, Donald Fried; fight direction, U. Jonathan Toppo. With Lance Coadie Williams, John Earl Jelks, James Colby. About two hours, 20 minutes. Tickets, $59-$199. At Studio 54, 254 W. 54th St., New York. Visit telecharge.com or call 212-239-6200.
‘Sweat’ review: Lynn Nottage gives intimate glimpse of lost factory life
Updated March 26, 2017 9:00 PM
By Linda Winer linda.winer@newsday.com
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Michelle Wilson, standing, and Johanna Day play blue-collar
Michelle Wilson, standing, and Johanna Day play blue-collar colleagues in Lynn Notage's "Sweat." Photo Credit: Joan Marcus
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Linda Winer
Newsday theater critic and arts columnist Linda Winer.
Winer is chief theater critic and arts columnist for Newsday, which she joined in 1987.
For a brief moment before the November election, the news was filled with stories about disenfranchised blue-collar voters in the Rust Belt. At the same time, smack in the eye of the news cycle, “Sweat” — Lynn Nottage’s drama about lives destroyed when factories moved to Mexico from Reading, Pennsylvania — had a justly celebrated Off-Broadway run at the Public Theater.
Although the cameras soon moved on to sexier topics, the drama, now on Broadway, is just as meaningful, just as powerful, equally far-reaching and intimate.
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To theatergoers who know Nottage from her masterly, inventive Pulitzer-winning “Ruined,” the straightforward naturalism of “Sweat” may be a surprise. But like “Ruined,” created from real stories of women’s sexual abuse in the Congo Civil War (and, criminally, never moved to Broadway), the new play grew from extended research in Reading by Nottage and her longtime director, Kate Whoriskey.
In a way, this feels like a throwback to Depression-era drama. The depression, however, is ours. The urgency, the deep specifics of the characters make the conventional structure an essential, almost radical part of the storytelling. The relationships are so multilayered, the economic and cruel racial realities so clear that fancier stagecraft might just get in the way.
Nottage wants us to get to know some people who, from 2000 to 2008, lost jobs, had their unions busted and saw generations of a way of life vanish along with their futures. “What the --- is NAFTA?,” asks one of the three factory friends — played by Johanna Day, Michelle Wilson and, new to the terrific company, Alison Wright.
At the center, but hardly alone there, are these three buddies who have worked decades on their feet at the steel-tubing factory. Relief comes at the bar where everybody knows more than their names — designed by John Lee Beatty with a turntable that contrasts the bar’s vibrancy with the dark reality outside.
Projected dates mark how quickly things went downhill in 2000. The shockers are the scenes that, every so often, flash forward to show the characters’ drastic transformation, especially the decline of one of the husbands (John Earl Jelks, heart-rending).
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The story begins at the end in 2008, when two of the women’s grown sons — marvelously played by Khris Davis and Will Pullen — are released from prison. Twisting in the economic tangles are racial ramifications. Was the black woman picked as supervisor to deliver all the bad news? When the Latino busboy (Carlo Alban) becomes a scab, can we mourn a union that had shut him out? We are meant to sweat all that, too.
Review: Lynn Nottage’s ‘Sweat’ Examines Lives Unraveling by Industry’s Demise
By CHARLES ISHERWOODAUG. 16, 2015
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Sweat Stephen Michael Spencer, left, and Tramell Tillman, right, with Jack Willis, play ex-convicts in Lynn Nottage’s new drama, at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland. Credit Jenny Graham
ASHLAND, Ore. — “Sweat,” the title of Lynn Nottage’s scorching new play, refers to the hard labor that its characters have put in for decades, only to find their modest livelihoods threatened by the evaporation of manufacturing jobs in America. But members of the audience may find themselves getting a little moist with anxiety as this extraordinarily moving drama hurtles toward its conclusion with the awful inevitability of Greek tragedy.
Certainly I found myself squirming in my seat as I watched the forces of fate, or, to be more specific, the mechanics of 21st-century American capitalism, bear down on these characters with the brutal power of a jackhammer smashing through concrete.
Ms. Nottage, who won a Pulitzer Prize for “Ruined,” her terrific drama about the human cost of a civil war in Africa, has surpassed even that achievement with “Sweat,” which is making its premiere at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival here in a blazingly well-acted production directed by Kate Whoriskey, who also directed the premiere production of “Ruined.” (“Sweat,” co-commissioned by Arena Stage in Washington, opens there in January.)
Ms. Whoriskey and Ms. Nottage drew on interviews with residents of Reading, Pa., ranked among the poorest cities in America, as part of their research for the play. And to describe the play as a trenchant and insightful analysis of the consequences of the sharp decline in factory work in the country, and the gutting of once-mighty unions, may make it sound like a hortatory tract aimed at raising awareness of the human blight these trends have caused.
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Forget all that. “Sweat” is by no means a thinly dramatized op-ed piece. From first moments to last, this compassionate but cleareyed play throbs with heartfelt life, with characters as complicated as any you’ll encounter at the theater today, and with a nifty ticking time bomb of a plot. That the people onstage are middle-class or lower-middle-class folks — too rarely given ample time on American stages — makes the play all the more vital a contribution to contemporary drama.
Extracting Art From a Downfall
Lynn Nottage explains how a broken city gets a turn onstage in her play “Sweat.”
And while its trajectory is dark, even devastating, “Sweat” is damn funny, too: Ms. Nottage knows well that the natural reactions to the assaults of life faced by these particular people are a savage sense of humor, and, more damagingly, a swan dive into the comforts of alcohol and drugs.
If I had pompoms, I’d be waving them now. But to get to the heart of the matter: “Sweat” opens with scenes set in 2008, depicting a parole officer (Tyrone Wilson) in meetings with two ex-convicts, imprisoned for their involvement in the same crime, who have come through the system with deeply divergent results. Jason (Stephen Michael Spencer), with white-supremacist tattoos etched into his face and neck, reacts with sullen anger to questions about his prospects. His former friend, the African-American Chris (Tramell Tillman), by contrast, has discovered the sustaining solace of religion, and hopes to get his life back on track by taking up the college studies he was forced to abandon.
“Sweat” moves fluidly between these passages (and others set elsewhere but at the same time) and scenes from eight years before, when the bulk of the action takes place. In the foreground of these scenes, set in a bar favored by workers at the local metal tubing plant, are three middle-aged women, fast friends who together have put in more than 60 years working machines on the factory floor.
Jessie (K. T. Vogt), passed out at a table in the corner, isn’t exactly doing her part to celebrate the birthday of Tracey (Terri McMahon), who we eventually learn is Jason’s mother. The breakup of Jessie’s marriage has driven her to imbibe more than usual, although Tracey doesn’t feel too sympathetic, having weathered her own failed marriage.
Cynthia (Kimberly Scott), the mother of Chris, has more pressing man trouble. (Both Chris and Jason, not incidentally, also work at the plant, although Chris has higher aspirations.) She had unwisely let her ex-husband, Brucie (Kevin Kenerly), move back in for a few days around the Christmas holidays, only to wake up on the morning itself and find half the presents under the tree gone — as well as her fish tank. Brucie, whose union has been locked out of the city’s other plant for two months after the union balked at draconian pay cuts, has been hitting something harder than the bottle.
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Generations dictated by the factory floor and the whims of American capitalism: A scene from “Sweat,” Lynn Nottage’s new drama, in a production at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Credit Jenny Graham
Presiding over Tracey’s informal birthday party — and the subsequent, less festive birthdays of Jessie and Cynthia — is Stan (Jack Willis), the bartender, though not the owner of the bar. He, too, worked in the factory, as did his father and grandfather, until an accident caused by a faulty machine almost cost him a leg. He’s an avuncular type who keeps the peace when necessary, with the help of his Dominican bar-back, Oscar (Carlo Albán).
Mediation becomes increasingly necessary when Cynthia applies for and, to everyone’s surprise, wins a promotion to management, causing a painful rift with Tracey, who had also applied and resents being supervised by a former equal. She attributes Cynthia’s selection to tokenism. More trouble comes when rumors of layoffs begin swirling, and Cynthia finds herself caught between her duties as a manager and her sympathy with her friends in the union.
With its large cast of precisely drawn characters — most of whom, when not riled by fear about their dimming futures, are great company — “Sweat” brims with the kind of ripe, richly imagined life associated with the work of the great August Wilson (a comparison I do not make lightly). Ms. Nottage’s colloquial dialogue doesn’t approach or even attempt his singing lyricism, but Jessie delivers a beautiful monologue about the life she might have led had she not, when still a teenager, started working in a factory.
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Ms. Nottage’s sympathies clearly lie with the workers facing virtual if not literal extinction (there are swipes taken at the North American Free Trade Agreement), but the politics are embedded so deeply in the drama that we never feel the playwright is distorting the play’s trajectory to score sociopolitical points. The issues this drama raises — painfully timely ones, I hardly need add — surface organically from the circumstances. Complex matters of race, class and culture are handled with impeccable deftness.
Writing that cuts this close to the bone draws out the best in actors. The ensemble is exemplary, so uniformly excellent that I cannot point to a single performance as rising above the rest. To laud them individually would require another review.
Let it be enough to say that each actor locates the rich humanity in his or her character, and transmits it to the audience with deceptive ease. When the play reaches its climax, we feel so swept up in the fracturing lives of the people onstage that the distance between that world and the real one it reflects with such searing precision has all but collapsed.
Correction: August 20, 2015
A listing of credits on Monday with a theater review of “Sweat,” at the Angus Bowmer Theater in Ashland, Ore., misspelled the surname of the associate director. She is Rebecca Wear, not Ware.
Broadway Review: Lynn Nottage’s Timely Drama ‘Sweat’
Marilyn Stasio
Theater Critic
Sweat review Broadway
Joan Marcus
March 26, 2017 | 07:00PM PT
Following an Off Broadway run at the Public Theater last fall, “Sweat” opened on Broadway March 26. The cast was largely the same, with the exception of new addition Alison Wright taking the place of Miriam Shor. Printed below is an edited version of Marilyn Stasio’s review of the Off Broadway production, which ran in Variety Nov. 3.
In “Sweat,” Lynn Nottage goes where few playwrights have dared to go — into the heart of working-class America. Her insightfully observed characters all went to the same schools, work at the same factory, drink at the same bar, and are going to hell in the same hand basket. Their jobs, their community, and their way of life are doomed, in director Kate Whoriskey’s mercilessly realistic production, although no one seems to have gotten the message yet.
The entire play takes place on John Lee Beatty’s splendid set of an old neighborhood bar in Reading, Penn., a second home for everyone who works in the factory in this factory town. Stan (a reliable James Colby) owns the place. Tracey, Cynthia, and Jessie, friends who work the line together as their families did for three generations, are his best customers.
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Tracey (Joanna Day, really committed to the role) talks tough, but seems content to work on the line for the rest of her life, provided she gets regular pay raises and the union continues to protect her benefits. Jessie (played on Broadway by Alison Wright) has no ambitions outside of getting wasted at the end of the week. Only Cynthia (a smart performance from Michelle Wilson) sees her factory job as a way to professional advancement. She applies for a supervisor job and gets it, without realizing the wedge it will create between her and her friends on the line.
None of them, however — not even Cynthia — thinks of looking beyond their day-to-day jobs. That soothsayer role falls to Stan, who reads both the newspapers and the writing on the wall. He’s heard rumors of layoffs and closings at other plants, and tries to alert his bar patrons. “You could wake up tomorrow and all your jobs are in Mexico,” he warns them.
“They got buttons now that can replace all of us,” someone finally realizes.
Nottage wrote “Sweat” after extensive interviews with people in Reading, which accounts for the solid character work and stretches of realistic dialogue. The plot is less successful for trying to cover every conceivable labor issue, from the failure of collective bargaining and the ultimate collapse of the trade unions to the toll on company towns when the local factory, coal mine or steel mill goes under. But credit the writer for giving many forgotten Americans a voice.
At Stan’s, the regulars are quick to dismiss the foreboding warnings as management gossip to keep everyone on edge — despite unmistakable signs that some of their neighbors are already cracking under the stress of shortened hours and cutbacks on the factory line. There’s a lot of heavy drinking and drug dependency. One poor guy burns down his own house. But not even a costly and fruitless strike by their union can get through to some people.