Page 28
September 30, 2015
Minority & Small Business Week
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ENTERTAINMENT
Feeling the Punch
O PINIONATED
J UDGE
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D ARLEEN
O RTEGA
BY
Working class
upheaval on the
Ashland stage
It often takes a generation or
more before we can grapple very
honestly with our most compli-
cated stories, especially if they
involve people at the margins, or
people who aren’t in a position to
control the dominant narrative. It
takes even longer if the margin-
alized are the protagonists of the
story. Think of how long it took,
for example, for someone to make
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King Jr. as its protagonist; how
much longer will it be before we
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that delve honestly into the experi-
ences of, say, black schoolchildren
in the segregated South, or undoc-
umented immigrants in the era of
fences at the U.S. border?
In many ways, we are still in
the middle of the so-called eco-
nomic restructuring at the cen-
ter of “Sweat,” Lynn Nottage’s
new play currently experiencing
its world premiere at the Oregon
Shakespeare Festival in Ashland
-- and that is part of why it feels
so bold. Commissioned as part
of OSF’s American Revolutions
program, supporting new plays
that focus on moments of change
in American history, “Sweat” is
set in the rust-belt community of
Reading, Penn., formerly a man-
ufacturing stronghold where a
union card was the ticket to a solid
PHOTO BY J ENNY G RAHAM
Stephen Michael Spencer(from left), Jack Willis and Tramell Tillman perform in ‘Sweat,’ a dramatic new play that centers on the upheav-
al that comes to a union town when working class jobs disappear because of new economic realities. ‘Sweat” runs through the month of
October at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland.
living and middle-class respect,
however modest. Now, however,
Reading is one of the very poorest
cities in America, with more than
40 percent of its residents living
below the poverty line in the af-
termath of the North American
Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).
“Sweat” explores some of how
that transformation has been expe-
rienced by working class people,
whose lives have changed course
dramatically.
The play is constructed around
an ensemble cast -- three mid-
dle-aged women who have worked
in a particular factory for more
than 20 years; the sons of two of
the women, beginning what they
fully expect will be the basis for a
solid living if they want it; a bar-
tender who worked for decades in
the same factory before becoming
injured on the job; a man who has
been locked out of his factory job
for an extended period; a proba-
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hasn’t been able to break into the
union. The play moves back and
forth in time between 2008, after
two of the characters have served
time in prison, and 2000, before
all of the characters felt the impact
of the NAFTA shifts.
Like many Americans, I have
a passing awareness of economic
upheaval over the past 15 years
or so, as manufacturing jobs have
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increasingly moved overseas. But
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cus of the dominant news stories.
Nottage’s new play goes there --
and not from the vantage point of
folks with any say in such matters.
Having spent two years engag-
ing with members of the Reading
community, Nottage has built a
story around characters who begin
(mostly) as friends, and end up
at odds -- but like the rotating set
of this play, she circles these sto-
ries. The play’s movement swirls
like a cyclone; in the beginning
we know things went bad but we
don’t know how and don’t under-
stand the relationships between
these characters. As we swirl back
and forth in time and through the
shock of lock-outs and increasing-
ly draconian moves from manage-
ment, we get a sense of the crisis
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trajectory of several of these char-
acters, we almost feel the punches
ourselves.
One of the things I most ap-
preciate about this play is that the
characters occupy no one position.
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C ONTINUED ON P AGE 30