Play Review: Sweat

Written by Zhiyun Zhao

Art by Aida Ebrahimi

Sweat is about a black woman, Cynthia, and her two white childhood friends, Tracy and Jessica, who are all workers in a factory in Reading, Pennsylvania. Cynthia's son Chris and Tracy's son Jason also work in the same factory. The conflict of this play begins when Cynthia is promoted to a management position, which irritates Tracy, who also applied for the position. She suspects that Cynthia got the promotion because of her race. To make it even worse, the factory decides to lower its cost by locking its old employees out. This happens soon after Cynthia's promotion, and she is immediately accused of not standing by her friends' side. After Jason and Chris are locked out, they dump their anger on Oscar, a Colombia-American who gets hired at the factory because he is willing to accept a lower wage. They violently beat him in a bar and are later sent to prison for 8 years.The settings in this play really fascinate me. For example, most scenes are set in a bar, where the three friends regularly meet after work. Readers can hear their concerns through their gossip and see how their friendship gradually collapses because of the events happening in their lives. The bar becomes a microcosm of the life of the working-class and interestingly, the play uses this microcosm to broadcast the working class's voices to a wider audience. Another interesting thing in this play is that even though politics is not often directly discussed by characters, the reader is still pushed to think of its influence on people's life. Each scene in this play is set in a different day in 2000 or 2008, which was the time when George W. Bush was running for and serving as president. Each scene also begins with a piece of news in politics from that day, usually relating to presidential debates or policies. The constant mentioning of politics reminds the readers to think about the correlation between economy and politics, and how they heavily influence working class lives.These deliberate settings help to demonstrate working class sufferings. For example, the heart-breaking separation of three childhood friends shows their desire for social mobility as poor working-class women. This is why Cynthia's promotion immediately stirs up jealousy, mistrust and conflict among them. The tragedy of Jason, Chris, and Oscar also shows how they turn their helplessness into violence, which causes more harm to themselves.Ever since the 2016 election, words like "working-class" and "immigrants" are frequently brought up in the media. This play, which was written in 2011, seems to have foreseen this trend and skillfully discusses these issues. Although Sweat is set in 2000 and 2008, this play is highly relevant and still worth reading today.