Review From first moments to last, this compassionate but clear-eyed play throbs with heartfelt life, with characters as complicated as any you ll encounter at the theater today, and with a nifty ticking time bomb of a plot. That the people onstage are middle-class or lower-middle-class folks too rarely given ample time on American stages makes the play all the more vital a contribution to contemporary drama... If I had pompoms, I'd be waving them now. Charles Isherwood, --New York Times About the Author Lynn Nottage's plays include the Pulitzer Prize-winning Ruined; Intimate Apparel, Fabulation, or the Re-Education of Undine; Crumbs from the Table of Joy; Las Meninas; Mud, River, Stone; Por'Knockers; and POOF! Nottage is an Associate Professor at Columbia University.
L**S
and latinx students - found this to be a great conversation starter about race issues
I taught this in my high school scene study course this year. It is a phenomenal script that is incredibly relevant to today's world. My teenagers - a mix of white, black, and latinx students - found this to be a great conversation starter about race issues. The script allowed us to explore controversial issues and difficult subjects in a way that everyone felt safe. Definitely a must read for up and coming theatre students.
F**I
excellent play on the economic downturn of small town, factory driven America
Lynn Nottage won her second Pulitzer Prize for this play in 2017 (her first was for Ruined in 2009). This play is set in 2008 in Reading, PA, and tells the stories of several individuals (black, white, and Hispanic -- all born in Reading). Most of the action takes place in several flashback scenes to 2000, where life has become increasingly difficult due to mills and factories closing down without new work coming in. The decline in jobs, wages and benefits hits the community hard, and workers turn against each other. Other problems ensue.Ms. Nottage has a deep understanding of human struggles and a strong ear for dialogue. There are several plot surprises. As in many of her other plays, she wants the audience to think, rather than to feel good.11/2/2018 Update: Saw it staged in Philadelphia last week. It was wonderfully rendered. It comes across much better on the stage. It's worth five stars when watching (as they are meant to be). It received a very rare standing ovation from me.
K**R
Brilliant piece of work
Definitely one of the best plays I've ever read, it's well crafted and speaks to the everyday man. I love how this book goes to the core of the anger that is plaguing America. The anger of the working man and how he ends up taking it out on the wrong person when in essence the corporations are the ones screwing everyone.
R**R
Brilliant!!
I have read all of Lynn's plays. Each is unique, each full of complex characters, each brutally honest and exquisitely painful. SWEAT is alarmingly accurate in its portrayl of depressed and backward Berks County, PA and the decline of factory, union, and the community. Relationships are both created and destroyed in this piece, as time flashes forward and backward, and the meanings of friendship and family are disolved and redefined.
J**N
Superb writing.
Superb writing. It must have been a gripping theatreexperience, but all of that comes through in justthe reading of the script. I felt, at the last page,that I had actually seen a production of the playitself.
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