A raw portrayal of working-class USA that has only continued to grow in relevance as the world falls apart around us
In 2016, Donald Trump was elected as the 45th President of the United States. In a toxic, divisive campaign that courted controversy over, amongst many other things, immigration, Trump continually harked back to a romanticised ideal of what the USA had been, promising that he would Make America Great Again. Despite voting for the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate for six successive elections beforehand, the state of Pennsylvania threw the full weight of its twenty electoral votes behind the Republican Party’s candidate, Trump, and helped seal what many considered a shock victory.
Three months after Trump’s inauguration, Sweat won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
Set in Pennsylvania, Sweat mostly takes place in the year 2000. The events of Sweat happen in a bar run by Stan, a former worker at the Olstead factory who quit after being injured by faulty machinery that management never fixed. The bar is frequented by a trio of friends and their family, almost all current workers at Olstead. When faced with the looming threat of layoffs, they turn on each other in a desperate bid for survival, opportunity, and dignity.
Sweat is about the working-class people who voted for Trump. More accurately, it is about the pressures and conditions that many working-class Americans were, and still are, put through on a daily basis by capitalist forces, a system that pits them against each other to divide and conquer in the name of profit, and if a community is shattered in the pursuit, that is just the cost of doing business.
This is the framework that Lynn Nottage, the playwright, has crafted for her characters. It gives their resentments and rage the oxygen and space they need to burn through. In doing so, her characters are afforded the humanity they deserve in an inhuman environment. The entire cast of Sweat do a marvellous job of portraying these complicated characters. They imbue them with a sense of lived-in weariness from lost hopes, and regret and shame. Tracey, for example, is an impatient woman with a gruff sense of humour who carries around all the bitterness in the world. She is a racist and she has trouble sympathising with others. She is, frankly, not a very likeable person. And yet the compassion in the writing and the acting makes you feel for her as you watch her very being disintegrate.
In Sweat, you feel this way for all the characters. There are no winners. For a few dollars more, the nameless and faceless management wage war against the vulnerable by using the even more vulnerable as human shields. To cope with the realities of their hardships, they have bought into a romanticised ideal of what Olstead had been, carved by the very hands of their immigrant ancestors which they believe gives them the right to be. Other immigrants, ones who have only existed in the background thus far but are now asking to come to the forefront, face a closed shop as they demean themselves to survive under this system. ‘Nostalgia’s a disease, Stan says at one point. It is imperative we do not swallow the charlatan cures of the ruling classes.
In 2024, Donald Trump was elected as the 47th President of the United States. In a toxic, divisive campaign that courted controversy over, amongst many other things, immigration, Trump promised that he would Make America Great Again. Despite voting for the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate in the election beforehand, the state of Pennsylvania threw the full weight of its nineteen electoral votes behind the Republican Party’s candidate, Trump, and helped seal what many considered an inevitable victory.
Sweat played at the Citizens Theatre, Glasgow on 6th May 2026 with further performances scheduled until 16th May, and will also play at the Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, from 3rd June to 20th June 2026.