'Sweat' is Lynn Nottage's new Broadway play about working-class frustrations
8 / 10
'Sweat' is inarguably a schematic socialist drama - and hardly the first to play at Broadway prices to mostly upper-middle-class urbanites - that clearly decided in advance what it wanted to say about the state of the nation. Its conclusion is not a surprise. But - and, along with a mordent wit, this is its mitigating strength and greatest asset - 'Sweat' also is a moral, passionate and richly articulated cri de coeur from one of America's leading African-American Playwrights aimed squarely at the ongoing inability of her hate-spewing white Brothers and Sisters to accurately locate the cause of their problems and to quit trying to drown the next worker trying to snag a spot in the lifeboat speeding away from the wreck of industrial America.
