Our Fractured Togetherness: The Political Realism of Lynn Nottage

“Given the depth and severity of the divisions displayed in Sweat, we are led to wonder if healing is even possible. But as a ‘doctor of American democracy,’ [Lynn] Nottage not only offers troubling diagnoses of our diseases but also prescribes remedies.”

What are the causes of American dividedness, and what remedies could enable civic healing? Theater—as opposed to journalism, political science, and sociology—might seem an unlikely source for knowledge about American politics. Yet theater has historically possessed the power to provide a mirror for the present and a roadmap for the future. As Hamlet says, just after using the analogy of a mirror, a well-written play can show “the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.” Or, to use a medical metaphor: If American democracy in this era of intense partisanship and rising political violence stands in need of doctoring, can a great playwright provide much-needed diagnoses and prescriptions for our divided nation?

In Lynn Nottage’s deeply-researched 2015 play Sweat, which presents a nuanced investigation of American dividedness, blue-collar workers at Olstead’s Steel Tubing plant in Reading, Pennsylvania, feel increasingly disrespected and exploited by elites in management, ignored by distant politicians, threatened by technology that may replace their jobs, angry at migrant workers and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), spiritually and existentially lost, inclined to violence, and tempted by the escape provided by drugs and alcohol. Shifting back and forth between the year 2000, in which the characters suffered job loss and violent tragedy, and the year 2008, in which two of the characters were released from eight-year prison sentences to uncertain futures and Congress passed a 700 billion dollar bank bailout, Nottage provides in this play an elegant, empathetic, and timely diagnosis of some of the underlying causes, the psychological seedbed, leading to support for demagogic leaders, nativist ideas, and populist protectionism. Although the play features a number of different themes—race, class, gender, nativism, technology, friendship—its primary and most fundamental theme is American dividedness. To borrow a phrase from the play’s final stage directions, we exist in a state of “fractured togetherness.” In what follows, I explore what Nottage teaches us, through this hyper-realistic and immersive play, about the causes of our divisions, and about how to heal them.

Categories of Struggle, and the Lattice of Divisions

As we learn especially from bar-room conversation, each character in Sweat struggles. Cynthia, an African-American woman in her mid-40s, pursues promotion to management at the steel tubing plant while dealing with her wild and estranged husband Brucie, who, transformed by drugs, deceives and robs her, disappearing with her pet fish and even her Christmas presents from under the tree. Cynthia’s good friend and co-worker Tracey, a white woman in her mid-40s, widowed, fears job loss and deals with unacknowledged sexual harassment at the plant. Jessie, an Italian-American in her 40s, whose husband divorced her and recently remarried, climbs onto a stool at the local bar each night to drink herself into oblivion; when Oscar, the Colombian-American busboy, helps her stagger to the restroom one evening she confusedly asks him if they are together. Freddy Brunner, a local man mentioned briefly in bar-room conversation, loses his job, is left by his wife, tries to shoot himself, burns down his own house intentionally, and gets arrested. On multiple fronts, then, things go wrong for these characters: money and employment, love and family life, legal trouble, and the use of drugs or alcohol. In fact, all four of these realms of life typically move in tandem; trouble starting in one realm quickly seeps over into the others. Job loss and job insecurity, especially, tend in this play to be first causes that produce marital trouble, drug use, and legal trouble. Nottage thus implies—and she underscores the point by means of italicized news reports which, prefacing each scene, blend descriptions of national and local events—that economics is never merely economic, that broader trends are deeply personal in their effects. If the United States has difficulty keeping blue-collar workers economically secure, those citizens will fall into all sorts of difficulties that go far beyond economics.