Sweat, at BCT

Or; The Bigger Crime

Lynn Nottage is a playwright who knows how to work with silences. Her characters have a habit of holding forth; long speeches skating over treasured memories and dragging up grand dreams, or piecing together little troubles and indignities. But the play gains its power where the words run out, and the silence left over is terribly full with unspeakable things. In Sweat, set in a local bar in Reading Pennsylvania, nests in a place of comfort: where the proud steel mill workers of the town feel free to connect, to spill their thoughts; where talk and cheap beer has seeped into the floorboards and the vinyl seat coverings. But tension has crept there too, and as the play progresses it climbs in like a tide. Another playwright would keep things at a steady boil, but Nottage lets the anger, the betrayal, the uncertainty serge from scene to scene, from moment to moment, then ebb away into moments of peace, only to smash it with another, bigger wave.

Set in 2008 and throughout the year 2000, the play starts with two young men, one white one Black, released from prison: Jason (David Kepner) and Chris (John Wicks). Both were put away from an unspecified crime and both have come out of prison greatly reduced, patched together with beliefs and props (Chris’s bible and quest for prayer, helpful, Jason’s white supremacist tattoos and attendant attitude, not so much). Both are trying to reclaim their lives and make sense of what happened eight years ago.

There, in the happier, simpler times of 2000 (or was it really?) we settle in with the two boys and their mothers Tracey (Jessica Ires Morris) and Cynthia (Joy DeMichelle) along with their depressed bestie Jessie (Katie Preston), as they take pride in their work for the steel mill, their place in the community, waited on by barman Stan (Richard Klautsch) and his bus boy Oscar (Jovani Zambrano). But as the mill’s bosses begin a shadowy process of downsizing, outsourcing, and cost cutting, and begin to starve the union of options, fractures begin to show and the ties begin to strain.

It’s a play that takes place behind the scenes of the labor struggle. There is no red flag to wave here, at least none we can see. We hear echoes of the rousing speeches, descriptions of the picket line, but everyone comes to the bar to drink and forget and dream, as much as they can. Providing sanctuary is Stan’s job and Klautsch is a near constant presence onstage, trying to keep the peace, support all parties best he can (until they cross the line, in more ways than one). Stan backs the speeches of his customers and friends with a head nod or a quiet rap on the bar (a beautiful bit of underscoring on Klautsch’s part) as he tires to navigate the new waters he’s sailed into and the crew of malcontents he’s bound to. Klautsch and Wicks share a gift for splinting the focus of a play like a prism, and holding in themselves contrasting but equally clear views. Wicks juggles mixes the cocktail of easy going nature with high octane spirit, wavering like a candle flame, his performance bright but grounded. He is a young man who could stretch his wings and flay away from the whole mess, forge his own destiny, but suspects he’s been sold a brightly painted mess of wax and feathers that will melt out over the sea.

The play though a wide ensemble piece, largely rests on the shared shoulders of Cynthia and Tracey, a burden their actors heft. DeMichelle’s sage preset is vibrant, flickering neon whether rhapsodizing about her work on the line or trying to match broken edges up with her ex-husband Brucie (Kelsey Watson, powerful and magnetic even in Brucie’s most defeated and strung-out state). Hers is a burning passion for little victories, trying to keep the ship steady, keep ahead. Whereas, Tracey relishes as fight, whose pride in her legacy carries her to places, a raging river that Morris navigates deftly, doing a lot to mix and pour a cup kindness and then throw it in our faces. She also does an expert job of exploring the poisonous roots that thread her character’s beliefs (let’s just say that Jason’s more abhorrent behaviors weren’t entirely learned in prison).

Sweat is a play about working. Honest working, the purpose that drives our days, the loyalty we give to our jobs and our colleagues, and the price in our time, in our health, in all our possible futures that we sacrifice. It starts in the aftermath of a dreadful crime, but though it never says so, is all about the millions of workers who were cast aside in the last forty years, and broke upon the ground, stripped of dignity and made expendable. And the last moment, like a nail to the ribs, that breaks your chest and stops you breathing; is how we cannot let go of the work, of that dream. Though they don’t realize it yet, the characters of Sweat are in free fall, dropped by history with the ground rushing up to them. But Nottage spreads their arms to feel the wind, and gives them little flashes of poetry, just sentences, before they disappear into silence.