SWEAT

By Diana Simmonds

November 17 2024

SWEAT, Sydney Theatre Company at Wharf 1, 11 November-22 December 2024. Photography by Prudence Upton

To be abandoned by a rapacious employer and hung out to dry by your trade union has to be among the bitterest experiences in a worker’s life. It happens repeatedly with every boom and bust, and in between times – essentially whenever an employer decides to apply the squeeze for more profit and productivity. In Lynn Nottage’s 2015 play Sweat the unseen but omnipresent owners of a steel mill in Reading, Pennsylvania are going even further: taking advantage of legislated globalisation (NAFTA) to shift their mill to Mexico and its even cheaper labour.

Sweat is set in the local bar where the ebb and flow of families, friendships, hopes, dreams, and disappointments happen, and where Stan the barkeep (Yure Covich) is the limping survivor of a preventable mill accident. The bar’s glowing lights, cold beer, ready whiskey bottle, and familiar decor are beautifully rendered by set designer Jeremy Allen and lighting designer Verity Hampson – whose chiaroscuro plays with the space and its furnishings are artfully appealing.

These comforting elements keep the harshness of the town at bay. At the same time, the wider world is also ignored. No one pays attention to the TV – unless baseball is on – so they don’t see Venus Williams playing for millions or George W Bush blethering, nor what is actually happening to their country under the steady rise of the One Per Cent.

For more than 20 years besties Cynthia (Paula Arundell), Tracey (Lisa McCune), and Jessie (Deborah Galanos) have busted their buns on the production line in the faintest of hopes that one day a promotion to supervisor might be offered. After work, they drag their weary bones into the bar for fun, companionship, and a break from no-hoper men and delinquent sons. Although Jessie is mostly three sheets to the wind and halfway to oblivion as one of the most tragically funny drunks seen since whenever.

The action jumps forward briefly to when Chris (thrilling newcomer Tinashe Mangwana) is released from jail and is being counselled by a parole officer (Markus Hamilton). What he did isn’t spelled out but it involved boyhood buddy Jason (James Fraser) and something bad. That once sweet-cheeked Jason now has swastikas tattooed on his face points to other, darker aspects of the soured American Dream. As does his mom Tracey popping Oxycontin for her sore back. At the same time, Cynthia’s man Brucie (Hamilton again) is the epitome of the dope-addled “just-lend-me-ten-bucks” charmer of disenfranchised Black maleness.

Division, when one of the friends gets the promotion and joins the suits in air-conditioned offices, is inevitable and bitter. The electrifying joyful exuberance and flirtatious love between Arundell and McCune give way to snarling incomprehension on one side and sorrow on the other. Resentment explodes into racism. The target switches to Oscar (Gabriel Alvarado, another welcome newcomer). That he was born in Reading – of Colombian parents – matters little when Latinos are “taking our jobs”. The social pot is coming to a boil and the stew is toxic.

Sweat is a story told all over the industrial and post-industrial world: Katherine Thomson wrote it for Australia more than 30 years ago with the marvelous Diving For Pearls – when what happens to Cynthia, Tracey, and Jessie in Pennsylvania happened to Barbara in Port Kembla. What’s heart-wrenching in all instances is how easily the masters turn their workers on each other and escape with the loot to Noosa or Cancun. Nothing changes and although they don’t know it, someone who promises to make America great again is bound to capture their attention sooner or later.

Dynamically directed by Zindzi Okenyo and flawlessly led by Arundell and McCune, they do more for the play than it probably deserves. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 2017 but that doesn’t entirely paper over its structural cracks and occasional tin-eared language. Nevertheless, the company delivers absorbing, fleetingly funny, and very moving two-and-a-half hours. Recommended without reservation.