By Lynn Nottage
HIGH EYEBROW ARCH – ⭐⭐⭐⭐
The Dramatic Premise
We’re in Reading, Pennsylvania. It’s the early 2000’s and George W Bush has just been elected President.
Childhood friends, Tracey (Lisa McClune), Cynthia (Paula Arundell) and Jessie (Deborah Galanos) are meeting at the local bar. There’s a jukebox in the corner and an electric Budweiser sign on the wall. Tracey and Cynthia are dancing and carousing and generally making a spectacle of themselves. Jessie is slumped over two bar stools. Stan (Yure Covich) is behind the bar, dispensing drinks and small-town wisdom.
Photo Credit STC
The three women have known each other their entire lives. They’ve grown up together. They’ve worked on the floor of the steel mill together. They’ve taken life’s blows together.
The three friends are proud of the role they and their families have played in the local community. Their fathers’ hands built the town. Now Tracey’s son, Jason (James Fraser), and Cynthia’s son, Chris (Tinashe Mangwana), have taken their places on the floor of the steel mill.
But the headwinds of change are beginning to sweep across the Mid-West and Reading is in their path.
The North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) has just come into force. The economy is undergoing reconstruction. And there’s an American-born Colombian assisting Stan behind the bar.
But there’s an opportunity for promotion from the factory floor to a management role. German-American, Tracey, and African-American, Cynthia. both put their hands up.
The Directors choose Cynthia for the job.
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Is Cynthia still one of the girls? Or does she now stand above them? And where does she stand when business decisions are made which affect her friends and their community?
Sweat is a story about how a fractured economy can lead to fractured relationships.
And Sweat celebrates that time, not so long ago, when a worker could make a decent living by making things with their hands.
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A Familiar Story Very Well Told
I’ve been listening to a lot of Springsteen lately.
Which is well-timed, because the characters in Sweat could have easily sprung from a Springsteen song.
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There’s friends meeting in a small-town bar. There’s parents and children who don’t see eye to eye. There’s an estranged husband who’s both a drifter and a grifter. There’s friends bound by a shared story. And there are jobs leaving town which ain’t never coming back.
Yet your hometown will always be your hometown. And the American dream is always within reach, even when it’s hanging on by the skin of its teeth.
What My Eyebrows Told Me
My eyebrows sat in a relaxed state for much of the first half hour. But they began to rise as the threads of the story began to unravel and overlaps. By the climax in the second Act, my eyebrows were riding in an animated High Arch, which is where they remained.
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