“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.
Drug and alcohol use, for these characters, is more often a symptom than a cause of trouble. If deeply unhappy people such as Jessie or Brucie turn to drugs and alcohol as a cure or anesthetic, then skyrocketing methamphetamine and opioid use should prompt not merely talk about a tragic drug crisis, or efforts to block the sale and flow of drugs, but also an attempt to investigate and address the deeper sources of unhappiness causing the intense need for drugs in the first place—sources which may not be obvious. In fact, for several of these characters, especially Brucie and Tracey, the use of drugs and alcohol is connected with spiritual or existential doubt or despair. Exhausted by a two-year strike at his plant, Brucie says to Stan (the bartender at the characters’ favorite bar), “I don’t know what to do? (Meaning: ‘What’s my purpose?’) You know…I don’t know anymore. What’s the point? You know? I’m being dead serious.” A crisis of meaning can quickly bleed into, or manifest itself as, a crisis of substance abuse. Tracey, too, on strike and unoccupied, turns to drugs in part because her very identity has been stripped away by the loss of work: “You know what? This is my first time outta my house in one solid week. Do you know what it’s like to get up and have no place to go? I ain’t had the feeling ever. I’m a worker. I have worked since I could count money. That’s me. And I’m thinking I’m not gonna go out, you know why? Because I don’t wanna spend money, because when my unemployment runs out I’ll have nothing. So I don’t go anywhere.” For Tracey, losing her job means losing her identity and her dignity as a worker.
From early in the play, we encounter a complicated lattice of divisions: racial divisions (seen, for example, in the mockery and dismissal of Oscar, and in Tracey’s response to Cynthia’s promotion), “born-in-America versus immigrant” divisions (although Oscar, assumed to be a migrant, was in fact born in Berks County), male-female divisions, and class divisions. Class divisions come to sight especially in the distrust and hostility felt by the floor workers for the plant’s managers and owner. If the contemporary American economy distances employers from employees, the resulting anonymity can easily breed indifference and inhumanity. Should management decide it’s more cost-effective to relocate the plant from Pennsylvania to Mexico, “they’ll pick up and run. That way they won’t even have to see your bodies as they flee.” This new attitude toward the workers, who had previously felt more supported and protected, takes Sweat’s characters by surprise. Whereas the plant’s new owner, according to Stan, is “the same brand of asshole as all of ’em, stuffing his pockets, rather than improving the floor,” the previous owner “used to be on the floor every single day…he knew what was going on, and you can only know that by being there. A machine was broken, he knew. A worker was having trouble, he knew. You don’t see the young guys out there. They find it offensive to be on the floor with their Wharton MBAs. And the problem is they don’t wanna get their feet dirty, their diplomas soiled with sweat…or understand the real cost, the human cost of making their shitty product.”
Complicating the class division is the (not only anti-elite, but) anti-elevation moral code of the blue-collar workers, who are committed to their way of life. When Chris (an African-American man in his early 20s) contemplates leaving the plant for a teaching program at a local college, his plan is met with skepticism by his father and outright mockery by his friend and co-worker Jason—“What, the floor, it ain’t good enough for you?!” Cynthia’s quest for a promotion from the floor to management is similarly met with skepticism from her friend Tracey: “Management is for them. Not us.” These workers feel inferior to elites in money and power, but superior in the virtues of hard work, genuineness, honesty, loyalty, and selfless devotion to their labor and their roles in their community. Therefore they spurn or scorn opportunities for the type of economic or social “advancement” that, in their view, would likely strip them of the deeper virtues they already possess.
Economic and Existential Vulnerability
Feeling increasingly hung out to dry—losing their jobs, losing job security, replaced by machines, losing meaning and direction in life—the blue-collar workers in the play grow desperate. “With this NAFTA bullshit,” Cynthia explains, “they can move the whole factory to Mexico tomorrow morning, and a woman like you will stand for sixteen hours and be happy making a fraction of what they’re paying you.” After the owners demand that the workers accept a 60% pay cut, even Cynthia begins to wonder if their friend Freddy Brunner was not so crazy for burning down his own house. Sensing the collapse of their world, these characters seek violent solutions, preferring at least the agency of deliberate self-destruction to passive dismissal, decay, and obsolescence. Desperate people seek drastic solutions or drastic change—in politics, too; therefore it is, to say nothing of moral obligation, short-sighted for elites to ignore, exploit, and anger the working class. The contemporary blue-collar worker in a globalized economy, feeling increasingly vulnerable, unappreciated, and afraid, faces not only the desperation of losing money, employment, and status, but the desperation of losing identity, dignity, and meaning. Again, as Tracey puts it, unemployed and lost, “I’m a worker. That’s me.” (1)
Never one to shy away from moral complexity, Nottage captures also the perspective of the temp workers hired to break the union workers’ strike. In the absence of a common good between the union workers and the temp workers (especially migrants), the standard class dichotomy—that the rich are at odds with the poor, while the poor have solidarity and a common interest—comes to seem simplistic. In fact, there are (at least three classes, namely) rich, poor, and poorer; and between the second and third groups, serious conflicts of interest may exist, which the standard dichotomy fails to capture. From the point of view of Oscar, who begins working at the plant during the union workers’ strike, it’s people like Cynthia and Tracey who are the elites; they are the gatekeepers who will not hire him at the plant, who block his employment with their cushy union jobs and privileges, who refused to let his father and him join the union.
Tracey, however, is furious with Oscar, and her fury helps catalyze the play’s climactic scene of violence. “I have no problem with you. This ain’t personal,” Oscar had previously assured her, but Tracey had responded, “You better believe it’s personal…for me.” Once again, Nottage shows that economics is personal, given its deeply personal effects. Even racial divisions, which had briefly seemed to die down, surge back with a vengeance late in the play, now entangled with class divisions. Jason, who had never seemed obviously prejudiced against Oscar before, now calls him a racial slur, partly because Oscar has become a class antagonist—not from “above” (an elite) but from “below” (a “scab,” taking his job, because willing to work for less). The blue-collar union workers feel pinched or pincered from both above and below: angry at elites above them as well as the poorer workers below them, they come to see elites and migrants (though Oscar himself is not a migrant) as being on the same team. Feeling attacked or threatened from both sides, with no allies, they come to hate elites as well as migrants, and the hatred resulting from class antagonism can subsequently spill over into, or at least exacerbate, racial divisions.
Although Stan, the middle-aged white bartender, tries to point out that the forces directing their fates are distant forces, and that Oscar is being scapegoated, anger seeks a visible and immediately present object: Someone must be blamed. The moral code of the working class—work hard, be tough, stand up for yourself, and remember that you deserve what you get—weighs down on Jason and pressures him into confronting Oscar. Jason himself does not understand why he has become so belligerent: “I don’t know why, but I can’t let him walk outta here.” At some deep level, he feels that if he does not violently confront and put down Oscar, taken as a representative of all that unjustly beats him down or robs him of his due, he will not be worthy of anything anymore, and will deserve to fade away into insecurity and oblivion. He is motivated not merely by power, money, or even status, but by concerns about dignity, identity, and a way of life. Yet his unjust and violent action causes a terrible domino effect. In the play’s climactic bar fight, when Jason and then also Chris attack Oscar, the violence surprisingly ends up hurting Stan most severely (when he attempts to intervene), rather than Oscar. Nottage may thereby suggest a self-destructive aspect to anti-migrant hostility and nativist fury: Jason, seeking to destroy his apparent enemy, in fact cripples the older representative of his own side, that is, destroys the foundations of “blue-collar traditionalism” itself.
A brief yet crucial italicized “Transition,” in the wake of the bar fight, zooms ahead to September of 2008 and describes then-President George W. Bush’s “very dire warning to the American people…unless Congress approves a $700,000,000,000 bailout for Wall Street, and it is approved within a matter of only a few days, there will be ominous consequences for the entire U.S. economy and for millions of Americans.” Given the context of this transitionary newsflash—job loss, drug use, violence, poverty, existential uncertainty, anger at elites, and the breakdown of civil relations in local communities—the message is clear. The working class felt utterly betrayed by the seven hundred billion dollar bank bailout for Wall Street. And their sense of betrayal and outrage at the reversal of justice (bad people rewarded, good people punished), as many commentators have noted, sparked or inflamed much of the discontent that led to then-candidate Donald Trump’s nomination and election in 2016. Feeling betrayed by elites in both parties, blue-collar workers sought and craved an outsider, or at least someone who looked like an outsider, who would speak for them, be their champion, and with boldness and authenticity stand up to those lying, selfish, greedy, incompetent elites who treated them like trash. They found President Trump to be at least close enough to what they were looking for. Throughout his current campaign, it has become clear that the former President—praising the forgotten working man, advocating protective tariffs and the restoration of factory jobs, touting his administration for getting rid of NAFTA, and selecting Ohio Senator J.D. Vance as his vice presidential running mate—is doubling down in 2024 on the strategy of appealing to working-class factory and industrial laborers. (2) And in the wake of the horrific assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, which left former President Trump bloodied, Corey Comperatore dead, and two others in critical condition, the raised middle fingers of rally-goers shouting back toward news cameras may indicate that anti-elite sentiment continues to extend to the media, thought to be complicit in the attack.
Paths Forward? Nottage’s Three-Part Prescription
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,” Nottage not only offers troubling diagnoses of our diseases but also prescribes remedies. Her three remedies for healing, offered in the play’s final two scenes, are of the “easier said than done” variety, but are nevertheless instructive.
When Chris and Jason revisit the bar at the play’s end, after serving eight-year prison sentences and returning to Reading, they find Oscar (the former busboy) now managing the bar. Stan, the former bartender, severely crippled by his brain injury, enters the room and “moves with extreme difficulty; it is painful to watch.” Unresponsive to others’ words, Stan wipes tables, drops his cloth, struggles to pick it up, and after Jason runs over and picks it up for him, utters a garbled “Thank…you.” When Jason says to Oscar, “It’s nice that you take care of him,” Oscar responds, “That’s how it oughta be.” These final words of the play suggest a prescription that may seem elementary or even naïve: We ought to take care of each other, as fellow citizens. The just political attitude, from which just political behavior springs, would be to orient ourselves toward taking care of our fellow citizens, which could be done in a number of ways: volunteering, giving to charity, advocating effective redistributive programs, doing valuable work well, taking care of family members, raising children with love and seriousness, helping friends, and helping strangers. Yet Nottage immediately complicates this message by not simply letting the curtain fall after Oscar’s words. Instead, a long and awkward moment follows: “(There’s apology in their eyes, but Chris and Jason are unable to conjure words just yet. The four men, uneasy in their bodies, await the next moment in a fractured togetherness.)” And only after this long moment hangs, does Nottage allow the blackout. The characters, then, as shown by this strained delay and silence, do not even know how to begin healing, or how to start on the path toward taking care of each other. Although granting by their silence the rightness of Oscar’s claim, they remain frozen in fractured togetherness, with no resolution in sight.
How then do we start on the path toward taking care of each other? A clue to Nottage’s advice in this regard emerges at the end of the play’s penultimate scene. In a split-scene on stage, Jason and Chris are each talking to their parole officer, Evan, at two different moments in time. When Evan turns away from Jason (after saying, “We been talking, and we can keep talking—but whatchu gonna do about where you’re at right now? You hear me?”), the lights shift, and we are back with Chris, talking to Evan. Yet we hear from the darkness Jason’s voice answering, “Yeah,” before Chris responds, “Yeah, I hear you.” What’s odd about this is that although Chris and Jason were speaking with Evan at two different times (and thus Chris must literally be responding to Evan), the sequence of dialogue gives the impression that Chris, reaching across time, is responding directly to Jason: “I hear you.” What Nottage indicates through this artistic decision is the surprising power of listening to bridge apparently unbridgeable divides. The difficult step of truly listening, even or especially to those we are most inclined to demonize—for example, to “Trump supporters” as demonized by the Left, or to “the bicoastal woke elite” as demonized by the Right—would be the first step toward overcoming the dichotomies that prevent mutual respect and care.
But how do we begin to listen to each other? Earlier in the same scene, Nottage indicates how political listening must proceed, if it is to bear fruit. Chris had described to his parole officer a recent sidewalk encounter with Jason, in which the two men’s harsh feelings toward each other dissolved and they unexpectedly embraced. After describing this moment of forgiveness—made all the more extraordinary by the fact that Chris, a young African-American man, embraced a man who was responsible for his recent prison sentence, and who now has white supremacist face tattoos—Chris says, “I’d spent so much time being angry at Jason, but standing there I don’t even know what I was feeling.” And the parole officer’s response provides a window on Nottage’s sensibilities as an artist and her moral compass as a citizen: “That’s okay,” Evan responds, “These things ain’t simple.” The background awareness implied by those crucial four words—“These things ain’t simple”—is a necessary condition for truly productive dialogue, as opposed to mere moralizing or condemnation. The stance of a true listener is the stance of someone who expects and invites complexity, and who—rather than listening merely tactically, as a way of storing up credit to rebuke or instruct—seeks genuine learning about and from a different perspective. Such listening is perfectly compatible with just and effective partisanship: Left-wing partisanship, for example, can increase its persuasiveness by taking more seriously the right’s concerns about border security, the prospect of racial color-blindness, and the villainization of conservatives by some in the media, even while arguing forcefully that former President Trump cannot be trusted to respect the norms of constitutional democracy. Similarly, right-wing partisanship can increase its persuasiveness by taking more seriously the Left’s concerns about poverty, environmental degradation, overt or subtle racial prejudice, and the toleration of differences, even while arguing forcefully for a re-embrace of traditionalism in certain respects. In fact, the recognition of complexity follows as a necessary consequence of devotion to understanding the truth about politics. Political realism entails political empathy, because a full recognition of the true complexity of human situations dissolves the simple dichotomies enabling demonization.
Through Nottage’s political lens, only untidy and incomplete solutions come to light, but our civic task becomes more clear: to take care of each other, in a way made possible by truly listening to each other, in a way made possible by striving to maintain awareness that “These things ain’t simple.” This play would ideally be required reading for every high-school student in America, chiefly because the nuanced and hyper-realistic presentation of its characters’ “fractured togetherness” is such a valuable step in the direction of deeper civic empathy. In taking this step, Nottage displays among other things the possibility of a bridge between the demands of realistic art and the demands of humane politics, politics aimed at the true common good.
Lewis Fallis teaches political philosophy and literature at the University of Texas at Austin, in the Jefferson Center for the Study of Core Texts and Ideas.
Endnotes
- See Jerald Pierce, “Review: ACT’s ‘Sweat’ challenges us to stop and listen to each other”: “even as these characters lash out, you can always see the desperation, panic and absolute terror at the possibility of having nothing behind every word.” Consider also the explanation offered by Tyrgaeus in Aristophanes’ Peace, lines 784–788: “Ah well, we won’t be using him [Hyperbolus, the demagogic successor to Cleon] for very long. At the moment people need a leader. They feel naked, so, for the time being, they’ve wrapped that man around them.”
- The 2024 Republican Party platform, which is dedicated “to the forgotten men and women of America,” states in its preamble: “The Republican Party must return to its roots as the Party of Industry, Manufacturing, Infrastructure, and Workers. President Trump’s economic policy to end Inflation and return Manufacturing Jobs is not only what the American Economy and American Workers need right now, it is also what they want right now.” Similarly, as Senator Vance put it in his Republican National Convention speech, “President Trump’s vision is so simple and yet so powerful. We’re done, ladies and gentlemen, catering to Wall Street. We’ll commit to the working man. We’re done importing foreign labor, we’re going to fight for American citizens and their good jobs and their good wages.”
