[NEohioPAL] Review of "Sweat" at Cleveland Play House

[Bob Abelman]

CPH’s blue collar drama “Sweat” champions the out-of-working class 



Bob Abelman

Cleveland Jewish News, The News Herald, The Morning Journal

Member, American Theatre Critics Association



 Lynn Nottage's Pulitzer Prize-winning "Sweat,” currently on stage at Cleveland Play House, seems better suited for the half-time entertainment at an AFL–CIO union event.



The drama, which addresses head-on the de-industrial revolution that hit the rust belt in the early 2000s and gutted the once-powerful labor unions, is intensely and adamantly committed to giving voice to and inspiring compassion for our nation’s out-of-working class.  



It sets its sights on a local bar – realistically rendered by designers Robert Mark Morgan and Alan C. Edards – in Reading, Pennsylvania which, in 2011, was deemed the poorest and most fractured city in the nation by the US Census Bureau.  But it could have easily taken place in any of the cities where, collectively, 6 million manufacturing jobs were eliminated and the local work force was left ill-equipped, unable or unwilling to re-tool and move on. 



It its efforts to champion the working class and create a monumental drama for our times, the play’s dialogue – a peculiar combination of realistic discourse and political flyer proselytizing – comes across as a public service announcement.  It is written to be spoken loudly and in bold capital letters so that the message does not get lost in the emotion.



This the marvelous CPH actors do while, miraculously, managing to give their characters dimensionality.



For more of this article, go to www.clevelandjewishnews.com/columnists/bob_abelman/
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