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영어

Lynn Nottage, in Sweat, dramatizes workers who have lost their jobs due to the flexible labor markets of capitalist neoliberalism. While few Americans were left unscathed by the financial crisis of 2008, the manufacturing industry and the unions upon which its workers relied began to rapidly decline over the prior decade when the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was passed into law. Nottage transforms intimate testimony and scrupulous research on the social and economic hardships experienced by the people she interviewed in Reading, Pennsylvania, one of the nation’s poorest cities, into a character-driven drama that explores the human costs exacted by the contradictions of late neoliberal capitalism. As drama is more social and political than any other art, Nottage tries to include social phenomena and the connection of human life in the play. Sweat, portrays the tragedy of the loss of employment and the fear of poverty. The play asks us to consider what constitutes a livable life when there are no jobs. The desperation of those most vulnerable leads to violence. And the ‘blind fury’ of workers who face unfair treatment is directed not at the top but to the side.