REVIEW: Blue collar drama a play for our times at the Citadel
With her Pulitzer Prize-winning play Sweat, playwright Lynn Nottage has created a gritty work that dramatically captures the tensions and pervasive feelings of anger and despair that have gripped middle America.
This is a play for our times – an insightful work based on the lives of real people – putting a human face on the continuing tragedy we see unfolding nightly on the news.
The American playwright, who has experienced considerable success with another play about “women who work,” Intimate Apparel (Citadel 2018), spent two and a half years in Reading, Pennsylvania in the heart of the failing “rust belt.” Reading entered the Gilded Age as a mighty industrial and economic giant thriving on its steel mills, foundries and coal mines. By the time Nottage showed up, the city had the highest share of citizens living in poverty in America. It must have been interesting being a middle-aged black woman hanging out in the bars, homes and work places of those who were living the downturn on a day-to-day basis – and it worked. Apparently her subjects were desperately anxious to tell her their stories.
On the Citadel’s Shoctor stage until Feb. 3, the play centres around the last of Reading’s glory days. It begins in 2008 in a neighbourhood bar where workers from a local factory hang out. Cynthia (Marci T. House), who is black, and Tracey (Nicole St. Martin), who is white, are longtime buddies – proud of their ability to work hard, and veterans of many happy evenings at the bar. Race has no place in this happy watering hole. Hope is in the air.
Cracks in their relationship begin when Cynthia is promoted to shop floor supervisor – a job they both competed for. The sense of betrayal is compounded when Cynthia reveals that the company is going to ask that the workers accept a 60% cutback in their wages. This leads to lockouts, imported scabs crossing the picket lines and acts of violence. One night, under the cover of darkness, the company moves half the machines to Mexico. The two friends are sadly torn apart by the management-worker division and long dormant racial tensions.
The bar is filled with colourful blue collar characters. There’s Stan (Ashley Wright), once a factory worker, but who suffered an accident and is now a loquacious bartender. The two women have sons, Chris (Andrew Creightney) and Jason (Chris W. Cook), both of whom are employed by the company. Jessie (Lora Brovold), a friend of both women, spends her evenings drinking herself into a stupor. Oscar (Alen Dominguez) is a Colombian-American who works in the bar and will play a major role as the story progresses.
Nottage is a rare, vital and important voice in American theatre. Her brilliance as a playwright is how she takes characters that in other hands could just be ciphers to advance an agenda, and turns them into real people. We see how work gives them identity and purpose – and how lost they become when their jobs are taken from them. Asks Tracey, “Do you know what it’s like to get up and have no place to go?” Cynthia sees her advancement as a sign of acceptance for a black woman. The play taps into the inchoate rage generated by collapsing hopes and corporate ruthlessness.
Much of the success of the show is due to ace director Valerie Planche. She gives each of her characters a unique voice and personality and then mixes them together in an extraordinary company of equals. The director has given them a believable emotional landscape to inhabit. These are world-weary foot soldiers losing the battle for the things that have sustained them for a lifetime. Cynthia’s drive for success might overcome the character but House gives her heart and depth. St. Martin’s likable Tracey slowly slides into an emotional minefield and shows an abrasive side brought about by the impending loss of a sustaining lifestyle. St. Martin and House have the easy rapport of two women who have been pals for a long time. Family, friendship, race, loyalty and finally survival are not just approached, but probed.
Set Designer Shizuka Kai manages to enclose the Citadel’s vast Shoctor stage to give the bar a cozy blue collar ambience – the perfect watering hole to have a few and to fuel discussion. Always looming in the background, almost like an additional character, is the shadowy form of the factory. Jenifer Darbellay’s costumes sum up the passage of years while Daniela Masellis’ sharp, percussive sound design effectively jolts us between scenes.
Sweat, a co-production with Vancouver’s Arts Club Theatre, is playing through Feb. 3.
Photos by Ian Jackson
