Sweat: US Rust Belt play has 'uncanny' echoes of 21st century Glasgow
Although it’s set in Reading, Pennsylvania, Lynn Nottage’s award-winning 2015 play Sweat will ring true in any town where heavy industry and manufacturing have declined, writes Joyce McMillan
The year is 2000, and a group of nine people - including the bar owner and his assistant - come and go in a local bar. They gather and disperse, celebrate and argue; and face the harsh realities of life in a once-thriving industrial town where well-paid jobs are growing scarcer by the year, and sheer economic stress opens up new wounds and divisions, in a community that once knew the meaning of solidarity.
This is the story of Lynn Nottage’s award-winning 2015 play Sweat, which will have its Scottish premiere next month, in a new co-production by the Citizens’ Theatre of Glasgow and Edinburgh’s Lyceum; and it’s clearly a drama that could be set in a thousand locations across the western world and beyond, where heavy industry and manufacturing have declined, leaving huge social scars behind.
It could be northern France, or Eastern Europe, or many parts of the UK, including Scotland. In Nottage’s play, though, it is the Rust Belt city of Reading, Pennsylvania, which was rated in the 2010 US census as the poorest in the country, with more than 40 per cent of citizens living in poverty; and the Citizens’ associate artist Joanna Bowman, who is directing the play, believes that Nottage - born in New York in 1964, and raised in Brooklyn - shares with great American playwrights like Arthur Miller and Sam Shepard a rare ability and willingness to focus on the lives and tragedies of “ordinary” people, whom history often ignores.
“I think she really has that Miller-like quality of paying deep and close attention to the detail of ‘ordinary’ lives,” says Bowman, in a brief break from rehearsals. “I first came across her work when I was a teenager, and I saw her play Ruined at the Almeida in London, about the plight of Congolese women raped in the conflict there. I was just enthralled by the way that theatre, in her hands, could take these massive ideas about war, and patriarchy, and the abuse of women, and completely humanise them, so that they came alive in front of you.
“I think all of her work has that quality, that sense of being so intensely specific and human that it becomes universal. The setting of Sweat is absolutely Reading, Pennsylvania, 25 years ago, observed in close detail; and yet it feels that it’s a story about the human consequences of capitalism that could be told in so many places - certainly here in Glasgow.
“There’s a lot in the play, for example, about the buildings in Reading that date back to the city’s industrial heyday - how grand they are, are how dignified and beautifully decorated, and how many of them are falling into disrepair. And that has so many echoes in Glasgow at the moment that it’s almost uncanny.”
That universal quality in the play is reflected in Bowman’s casting for the production, which took her longer, she says, that any other casting process she has ever undertaken. The play involves nine characters, including three strong middle-aged women who have worked together for decades at the local steel tube factory, along with their families and friends. It is vital to the story that some of the characters are black, and others white, while one comes from a completely different migrant background; and over a period of months, Bowman put together a cast that includes two Scottish-based actors - including Lucianne McEvoy, who plays the key role of middle-aged worker Tracey - as well as two from the United States, one from Colombia, and others cast across the UK from Yorkshire to London.
“I’m really confident,” says Bowman, “that if this play were being produced at the Citz’ in 20 years’ time, we would be able to cast it entirely in Scotland; there is a wonderful younger generation of Global Majority actors coming through here now, and I’ve taught many of them. But the age range still isn’t quite there; and that’s why I had to look so widely, and keep going, until I got this cast just right.”
Bowman’s own directing career has developed a quietly stellar quality since she graduated from the University of St Andrews a decade ago, completing an MFA in directing at Birkbeck in London two years later. She has worked at A Play, A Pie and A Pint as well as at the Citizens’ and the Tron Theatre, with her name on a production gradually becoming a notable badge of quality; and in 2024, she won the Critics’ Awards for Theatre in Scotland Best Director award, for her superb Tron production of Caryl Churchill’s brief and devastating masterpiece Escaped Alone, about four “ordinary” women on the brink of apocalypse.
“I really do believe in the collective, in these times,” says Bowman, “and in the power of coming together in theatre to face up to the crises we’re confronting. In Sweat, we can see how painful divisions around race, gender, migration, and even disability begin to surface as the city’s economy fails, and division and blame begin to replace community and solidarity. People said that the play was prophetic in anticipating the Trump era in politics; but I think that Nottage just paid attention to what was happening to people, and the almost inevitable consequences of that.
“So it’s not about conjuring up a happy ending; that’s not possible in this play. But it is about coming together to face tough realities; to hang out in the bar with these nine characters for a while, to hear a really good story, and to acknowledge what it’s telling us about recent history. Sometimes, that act of truth-telling is all we can do, in difficult times; and if we do it together, in a shared space like theatre, then that can feel like a vital step forward, in itself.”
Sweat is at the Citizens’ Theatre, Glasgow, from 2-16 May, and at the Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, from 27 May-13 June
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