here<u+2019>s my no. 1 recommendation for life in the age of trump: lynn nottage <u+2019>s <u+201c>sweat,<u+201d> now playing at new york<u+2019>s public theater through dec. 18, should transfer to broadway as soon as an uptown theater becomes available. it<u+2019>s a play about the unemployed steelworkers of reading, the pennsylvania city that has become synonymous with deindustrialization<u+2014>and it opened at the public just a week before the election. beyond its high quality as a work of art, what makes <u+201c>sweat<u+201d> so significant is that berks county, pa., of which reading is the county seat, went for donald trump over hillary clinton, 93,094-75,169. eight years ago it went for barack obama over john mccain, 97,047-80,513. between them, those numbers say a great deal about the 2016 presidential race, which is why mr. trump<u+2019>s victory won<u+2019>t have taken you wholly by surprise if you saw <u+201c>sweat<u+201d> prior to last tuesday. but while ms. nottage has written a political play in the broadest sense, the key to understanding <u+201c>sweat<u+201d> is not that its author is black, or a political progressive. while both these things are true, <u+201c>sweat<u+201d> was written prior to mr. trump<u+2019>s emergence as the leader of the republican pack, and he goes unmentioned in the play, which takes place between 2000 and 2008. nor did ms. nottage write <u+201c>sweat<u+201d> to persuade anyone to do anything in particular. her purpose was simply to show us how the people of reading feel, and to try to explain why they feel that way. to this end, she did something that playwrights too often fail to do: she went to reading and talked to the people about whom she was writing. more important, she listened to them<u+2014>hard. <u+201c>when i sat in rooms with middle-aged white men, i heard them speaking like young black men in america,<u+201d> ms. nottage said in a recent interview with fortune. <u+201c>they had been solidly middle class for the majority of their working careers, but now they were feeling angry, disaffected, and in some cases, they actually had tears in their eyes.<u+201d> the result was a play that puts raw flesh on the exit polls. in one scene, two characters are watching the 2000 republican debate, about which they have this to say: <u+201c>who are you liking?<u+201d> <u+201c>don<u+2019>t matter. they<u+2019>ll all shit on us in the end.<u+201d> what<u+2019>s more, the context makes clear that the characters are not talking about republicans only, but all establishment politicians. ms. nottage<u+2019>s open-eared reporting is part of what makes <u+201c>sweat<u+201d> so good. but most of what makes it good is that it<u+2019>s an impeccably solid piece of theatrical work<u+2014>tightly structured, free of wordy sermonizing, full of surprises. the drama is personal, a story of real people pushed into a corner, and broader implications are left unspoken. <u+201c>sweat<u+201d> is a model for serious political art<u+2014>artful political art, if you will. in my experience, most political art, especially theater, is of the other kind, crude, hectoring and smug. no, not the masterpieces, of which bertolt brecht <u+2019>s <u+201c>life of galileo,<u+201d> which leaves no doubt of where its author stands but is primarily concerned with its poetic expression, is the quintessential example. far more common, alas, are plays like sam shepard <u+2019>s <u+201c>the god of hell,<u+201d> an inept <u+201c>satire<u+201d> of <u+201c>republican fascism<u+201d> (shepard<u+2019>s words) that opened shortly after the 2004 election. mr. shepard<u+2019>s black-hatted villain is a bush-loving neocon who hooks up the genitalia of a wholesome wisconsin farmer to a set of electrodes and shocks him until he agrees to give up his heifers to the federal government for use in a monstrous secret project. did <u+201c>the god of hell<u+201d> persuade anybody of anything they didn<u+2019>t already think, save that its author had lost his fast ball? i doubt it. it<u+2019>s too soon to say whether <u+201c>sweat<u+201d> is a masterpiece. but i do think ms. nottage is an important playwright, and the fact that an important playwright has chosen to write a play like <u+201c>sweat<u+201d> at a time like this is hugely consequential. w.h. auden famously wrote in 1939 that <u+201c>poetry makes nothing happen.<u+201d> i know what he meant<u+2014>art alone has no power to change the world<u+2014>and i think he was right. but ms. nottage has made something else happen in <u+201c>sweat,<u+201d> something that was aptly summed up in the words of an even greater artist than auden, joseph conrad : <u+201c>my task which i am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel<u+2014>it is, before all, to make you see .<u+201d> only the very best artists can make political art with that kind of revelatory power. bless lynn nottage for doing it. <u+2014>mr. teachout, the journal<u+2019>s drama critic, writes <u+201c>sightings<u+201d> every other thursday.
the play that explains trump<u+2019>s win - wsj
terry teachout