new york lynn nottage, the author of <u+201c>ruined<u+201d> and <u+201c>intimate apparel,<u+201d> is as fine a playwright as america has, and <u+201c>sweat,<u+201d> her latest effort, has come to new york<u+2019>s public theater at a breathtakingly timely moment. ms. nottage<u+2019>s subject, which she dramatizes with raw passion and searching moral consciousness, is the daily life of the unionized factory workers of reading, the pennsylvania town whose name has become a byword for working-class unemployment in the age of deindustrialization. donald trump, whose presidential candidacy was still coming into focus when <u+201c>sweat<u+201d> was first performed at the oregon shakespeare festival in the summer of 2015, naturally goes unmentioned in the play, which is set between 2000 and 2008. still, the issues that mr. trump rode to the top of the republican ticket were every bit as salient then as now, and oskar eustis, the artistic director of the public theater, must be hugging himself for having had the prescience to bring ms. nottage<u+2019>s play to the public less than a week before election day. sweat public theater, 425 lafayette st. $85 and up, depending on availability, 212-967-7555, closes dec. 4 the public<u+2019>s production of <u+201c>sweat<u+201d> is a remount of kate whoriskey <u+2019>s fire-eating oregon production, which subsequently transferred to the arena stage in washington. the cast has changed, in all cases for the better<u+2014>the stylistic unanimity of ms. whoriskey<u+2019>s new ensemble of actors is awe-inspiring<u+2014>but the play itself, which mostly takes place in a blue-collar bar in reading, is substantially the same one i saw in oregon. it is the story of a group of striking workers whose employers, motivated by the north american free trade agreement, are moving their plant to mexico. the workers are terrified, not just because they<u+2019>re out of work (or about to be) but because their jobs are their lives, a fundamental source of their personal identity. without jobs, who are they<u+2014>and what will they become? <u+201c>this is my first time outta my house in one solid week,<u+201d> one of them tells a friend. <u+201c>do you know what it<u+2019>s like to get up and have no place to go? i ain<u+2019>t had the feeling ever. i<u+2019>m a worker. i have worked since i could count money. that<u+2019>s me.<u+201d> while <u+201c>sweat<u+201d> is written from a progressive perspective, ms. nottage doesn<u+2019>t idealize her increasingly self-destructive characters, or paper over the fact that they share responsibility for their plight<u+2014>not one of them is willing to leave reading in order to find work<u+2014>with their unseen bosses. her purpose is simply to show us what it feels like to be unemployed in a dying factory town. these men and women, who remember (in the words of one of the characters, played with stark simplicity by johanna day ) a world in which <u+201c>if you worked with your hands people respected you for it,<u+201d> now live in a meritocratic knowledge economy that has less and less use for people who (as ms. day<u+2019>s character admits later on in the play) <u+201c>never liked school.<u+201d> what kind of future do they have? <u+201c>sweat<u+201d> is not an updated version of such simplistic theatrical cartoons of the <u+2019>30s as <u+201c>the cradle will rock<u+201d> or <u+201c>waiting for lefty.<u+201d> it<u+2019>s is a deeply humane drama about real people with real problems, and no matter who you<u+2019>re voting for, if anyone, next tuesday, you owe it to yourself to spend an evening with the desperate folk whom it portrays. <u+2014>mr. teachout, the journal<u+2019>s drama critic, is the author, most recently, of <u+201c>satchmo at the waldorf.<u+201d> write to him at tteachout@wsj.com.
<u+2018>sweat<u+2019> review: when your job is your life - wsj
terry teachout