Playwright Lynn Nottage gives voice to blue-collar America in her Pulitzer Prize-winning Sweat, now making a gut-punching Los Angeles debut at the Mark Taper Forum, a suspenseful, insightful look at an electorate so disillusioned by their failed American Dreams that they ended up doing the unthinkable.

The year is 2008, the place is Reading, Pennsylvania, and two recent parolees, both in their late 20s, one black, one white, are having a pair of one-on-ones with probation officer Evan (Kevin T. Carroll).

The first, Jason (Will Hochman), sports white supremacist tattoos on his face, a combative attitude in his snarl, and when a urine sample is demanded, does not hesitate to spit out the N word to the African-American Evan.

 The second, Chris (Grantham Coleman), is now just eight credits short of a prison-earned college degree, and though the jobs he’s been applying for pay no more than seven or eight dollars an hour, he seems willing to do what it takes to make a fresh start on the outside.

 Each interview ends with the revelation that the former best friends have only just run into each other for the first time since being sent to the slammer eight years ago, a meeting that neither can get out of his head.

 Flashback to the winter of 2000 and the neighborhood bar where steel workers Cynthia (Portia), 50ish and black, and Tracey (Mara Mara), 50ish and white, are celebrating the 40somethingth birthday of Italian-American Jessie (Amy Pietz), drinks being served by bartender Stan (Michael O’Keefe) as a young Latino (Peter Mendoza as Oscar) wipes glasses, carries out trash, and tends to other menial chores.

 Despite having worked side by side pretty much since high school, Cynthia and Tracey could hardly display more different attitudes. The former aspires to a move from line work to management, something that might just be in the realm of possibility given talk about hiring someone from the floor to replace a recent promotee. Her best bud, on the other hand, believes that “Management is for them, not for us,” a tenet seconded by Stan, who during his twenty-eight pre-injury years at the plant never saw a single soul plucked off the line and moved up.

Sweat asks us to piece together, little by little, bit by bit, who these five characters—and Brucie (John Earl Jelks), black, 50something, and locked out these past ninety-three weeks from the factory job he once thought union safe—are connected to Jason and Chris, while keeping us in edge-of-seat suspense as to the nature of the crime that sent two young men to jail, just one reason Sweat proves a spellbinder.

 More significantly, this companion piece to Dominique Morisseau’s Skeleton Crew sheds light on characters far removed from the average theatergoer’s daily life, men and women whose latent racism and xenophobia can provoke ruptured friendships, violent acts, and votes for a man with promises as empty as his soul.

 Under Lisa Peterson’s razor-sharp direction, an L.A./N.Y.-based cast deliver nine powerhouse performances, from rising young dynamos Coleman, Hochman, and Mendoza, to the longer-resuméd—and equally superb—Carroll, Jelks, O’Keefe, and Pietz, and most memorably of all, a pair of stupendous star turns by Mara and the mononymous Portia as best friends forever, or at least until push comes to shove.

 Scenic designer Christopher Barreca takes advantage of the full width of the Mark Taper Forum stage to give us a magnificent, bigger-than-Broadway watering hole, stunningly lit by Anne Militello as are Emilio Sosa’s actor-transforming costumes, with Paul James Prendergast’s sizzling original music and sound design and Yee Eun Nam’s electrifying projections completing a sensational production design mix.

Fight director Steve Rankin has choreographed some frightening real stage combat. Dialect coach Joel Goldes ensures authentic working class accents.

 Casting is by Heidi Levitt with New York casting by Billy Hopkins and Ashley Ingram. David S. Franklin is production stage manager.

Though only folks with $30 to $99 at their disposal will be able to catch Sweat at the Taper, characters like those Lynn Nottage has created can rejoice in knowing that their lives have been well served. As gripping as it is insightful, Sweat does its factory-working protagonists proud.

Mark Taper Forum, 35 N. Grand Avenue, Los Angeles.
www.centertheatregroup.org

–Steven Stanley
September 6, 2018
Photos: Craig Schwartz

Tags: Center Theatre Group, Los Angeles Theater Review, Lynn Nottage, Mark Taper Forum