Sweat, set in the Pennsylvanian rust belt, looks at a blue-collar community threatened by a factory closure. The script uses the flashback device. Scene One informs us that two lads were found guilty of doing a Bad Thing eight years ago. What Bad Thing? The author won’t tell us because the play needs suspense but the revelation is delayed so long that our patience is tested to the limit.
The flaccid writing doesn’t help. Scene Two lasts 30 minutes and introduces us to the main characters, who visit the same bar every evening to get hammered and scream at each other. The only dramatic point in this lengthy scene is the revelation that two lovers had a big row about a fish tank. Scene Three tells us that cheap Hispanic labour is being hired but this snippet emerges only after six long minutes of dreary jabber. And so it goes on. Scenes are constructed around great wodges of chitchat but with little action or narrative development.
Though the characters are ethnically diverse, the author evidently disapproves of most Americans. The white characters are far thicker and less imaginative than their black counterparts. The whites, one of whom is illiterate, are content to toil in the factory until they die while the blacks seek promotion and education. And the whites are openly racist unlike their black chums who seem entirely free of prejudice. Jason, white, tells his black pal, Chris, that Black History Month should be renamed White Guilt Month. In reality that would end their friendship but Chris shrugs off Jason’s crass insult.
After they serve time in jail, Chris turns to the Lord for redemption while Jason joins the Aryan Brotherhood and gets a swastika tattooed on his face.
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