Music Credits: Excerpts of guitar music composed and performed by Jorge F. Hernández, used courtesy of Mr. Hernández. Lynn Nottage: Well, the play looks at two generations of factory workers. And specifically it focuses on a group of friends who are very close-knit and by-and- large have worked at the factory for about 25 years. And they discover that they’ve grown to be locked out of the factory and the play centers around how that impacts their friendships across economic and racial lines. Jo Reed: That’s the award-winning writer, Lynn Nottage, talking about her new play, Sweat, which recently opened at Washington, DC’s Arena Stage. And this is Art Works, the weekly podcast produced at the National Endowment for the Arts. I’m Jospephine Reed. Lynn Nottage is a great American playwright who writes compassionate, unsentimental plays that often have women of color at their center. Her topics have run the gamut: from Intimate Apparel, in which in 1905, an African American seamstress tries to make her in the world, to Crumbs from the Table of Joy, which centers on Church politics and an interracial marriage in 1950s Brooklyn, to Fabulation, in which a Black professional woman loses everything and finds herself back with her working class family. Nottage’s best known play is probably Ruined, which looked at systematic rape as a means of war in the Congo; a place so unmoored that a whore house provides a place of safety for these brutalized women. No one ever said Nottage writes easy plays. She’s engaged with the world around her and committed to portraying people in all their complexity. Lynn Nottage’s latest play, Sweat, is no exception. As she mentioned, the play focuses on what happens to a group of workers when their jobs are threatened. But it is not didactic. It has a plot wound tighter than a drum as it moves back and forth in time between 2000 and 2008. Refusing to look away from imperfect people, who simply want decent pay for good work. Excerpt: Twenty-eight years and that’s when I understood. That’s when I knew that I was nobody to them. Nobody. Three generations of loyalty to the same company. Now, this is America, right? You think that means something, but they act like they’re doing us a goddamn favor. I’ll tell you what, that’s why we’re failing. And I’m talking about all of them. You name ‘em: Casper, Aspry Technologies. Bottom line, they don’t understand that human decency is at the core of everything. They squeeze us like a sponge. They drain out every last drop of blood and then they throw us away. Jack, for 28 years I can count of one hand the number of times they said thank you. Hey management, look me in the eye now and again and say thank you. Thanks Stan, for coming in early; for working on weekends. Good job! I love my job. And I was good at job. 28 years. Jo Reed: What inspired this play? Lynn Nottage: The play really, for me, began with a letter. Or rather an email that I received from a friend, a very close friend of mine, who was a mother of two – single mother – who lived two doors down from me. And she sent an email at midnight and I just happened to be up and I opened it. And in it she said that she was in trouble. That she had been having serious economic problems and hadn’t worked in about six months and she wasn’t asking for anything other than her friends understand her condition. And it really broke my heart because this is a very close friend of mine. I see her every day. She’s someone who comes out of her door with an enormous smile on her face and it broke my heart that I wasn’t aware of her economic situation. And it made me really think about how close all of us are to poverty; how it’s no more than two doors away from us at any given moment. And it really sent me on this journey to understand how economic stagnation – how the economic downturn – which, this was in 2011, was really impacting the lives of Americans. And Americans who had been traditionally middle class. Who had been comfortable, who had built lives only to see those lives ripped out from under them very quickly Jo Reed: And you decided to focus on factory workers. Lynn Nottage: Yes. It was sort of a journey to get there. I began by turning my focus on a city, which was Redding, Pennsylvania, which in 2011 was declared the worst city in all of America. And I found that that was really fascinating because it was a city that’s no more than 55 minute drive from Philadelphia. It’s in Burkes County which is sort of a very fertile, very rich county in Pennsylvania. And I want to know, how could this happen? It seemed really to be quite a metaphor for what was happening on a larger scale in America. You could have someone who could be living in the center of a city that’s doing quite well, like New York, and still be impoverished. And I think that Redding was very much like that. And so I began going to Redding, and over the course of 2 years, trying to interview people from the top to the bottom. From the mayor to social workers to people in the legal justice system to homeless folks who were living in the woods. And I happened upon a group of steel workers who had been locked out of their factory for 92 weeks and I found the story to be incredibly compelling. They were a group of folks who had worked at this factory, some of them as long as 35, 40 years, who suddenly had their lives upended when they were asked to make some serious concessions on their contracts. They were asked to take 60 percent pay cuts. They were asked to sort of relinquish some of their benefits. And I was incredibly moved by their fortitude; by their decision to sort of resist management undermining all of the hard work that they had done for years. Jo Reed: I’m convinced it’s an upending of the social contract Lynn Nottage: Yes, very much so. I think that for many years that there was this notion that if you worked incredibly hard and you invested in your job, that you would be rewarded at the end of that journey. That was just the ‘American dream’, the American contract. And somewhere beginning in the ‘70s, corporations and factories discovered that they could boost their profits by reducing the benefits for their workers and decided that they no longer wanted to share the pot with everyone. Jo Reed: How did you get to meet the people in Redding? I don’t mean the mayor and the social workers. I mean the regular folk who you clearly talked to. Did you just go to a bar? Lynn Nottage:  Yeah, very much. We’d just wander into bars or we’d wander into restaurants, or we’d meet one person who said ‘you know who you have to meet? You have to meet this person.” We’d go to the green market and people would say ‘well, what are you doing with a camera? What are you doing with that tape recorder? And immediately, everyone wanted to speak to us. I found that there was a real need and urgency to be heard that by-and-large the majority of people we encountered in Redding felt invisible and ignored and they had a great deal to say about their state of being. Jo Reed: And they were eager to speak with you? Lynn Nottage: Yeah, very much so.  There was a real eagerness and urgency. Jo Reed: You know, one of the many reasons why I think this play is so important is that we don’t see these issues played out in the theater. We don’t see them played out on films – few exceptions. And we don’t see them played out in literary work either – with the exception of crime novels. In crime novels, people actually have to go out and work for a living. But in a lot of fiction, I don’t know, money just happens. Lynn Nottage: Yeah, well it remains a great mystery to me is why this need to make the working people invisible in this country. And I don’t know what the exact moment was when we decided that we no longer wanted to see people at work unless they were in white collar shirts and in advertising agencies and banks. But they didn’t wanna see people on the factory floor, you didn’t wanna see people driving buses or driving the trains. I don’t understand why because so many of us, we have our roots in the working class. These are the people who shaped our lives. I mean, certainly my family was very hard working folks. My mother was a school teacher, my father was a social worker, and prior to that my grandmother was a domestic and my grandfather was a Pullman porter. I mean, these are people who had really rich, complicated lives who were working people but for whatever reason, somehow the stories aren’t as valued. Jo Reed: Sweat begins, not at the end of the story, but pretty close to the end and then goes back to the past. And there’s this back and forth that happens throughout the play. Explain why you did that. Lynn Nottage: Well, I’m really interested – it’s interesting – the folks can’t see it, but the way in which you folded your hand over, and I’m interested in the way in which sort of time folds over and it goes back and forth. And choice we make in the past impact the choices we make in the future and our lives in the future. And so I wanted to start at the point of incredible trauma for these young men and the audience doesn’t quite understand what has happened. And the play becomes the mystery. What happened to these men? One who is a neo-Nazi and the other who has sought refuge in the Bible. And they’re men in their late-20s. It’s like, how did they arrive at this point where they feel totally lost? And they’re reaching for things that are, in many ways, outside of themselves. Jo Reed: And what’s also clear is how close they once were and what happened to make them turn out so differently. Lynn Nottage: Yeah. How could 2 men who were best friends, who grew up together, who basically lead very similar lives – one black, one white – end up on opposite sides of the divide? Jo Reed: As their mothers did in some way. Cynthia is an African American worker who gets promoted to a managerial position. And that really does put her friendship with Tracey under a lot of stress. Lynn Nottage: Definitely. Correct is that you have this enormous schism in the friendship based upon race and also based upon economics in that you have one person who’s promoted and who’s no longer part of the labor force. She’s management now. And so when the factory decides to lock out workers, you have one worker who stays in the others who are forced out. And it really tests that friendship and it really strains it. Jo Reed: It’s a very poignant and powerful moment in the play when Tracey says Cynthia got the job because of her race. Because she’s black. And Cynthia just shuts that down completely and really, really reached for that friendship that they had in a way that I thought was very powerful. Nottage: Yeah, well I think that it’s very fraught and difficult for these two women because the friendship is the foundation of who they are, but the economic strain really sort of forces a wedge between them. And one of the things I wanted to explore in the play is just how they continued to reach for each other and strain. But the reality has just forced them apart. Jo Reed: Well, Tracey certainly says horrible things and provokes horrible actions. But she has a few scenes that are almost like monologues for her and boy, do they just tear at the heart. Lynn Nottage: One of the things that I was particularly interested in this play – and it’s a phrase that I probably overuse – is to sustain the complexity that life isn’t black and white and that we at some times wear the quote unquote “white hat” and quote unquote “black hat”. Is that the reality is that we occupy the gray area more often than not and often we are forced to make very compromised choices in order to survive and I think that’s what’s playing out in Sweat. I was also interested in how everyone in the play, at some point, does something reprehensible. That no one is free of guilt. That everyone’s somehow complicit in where the play ends. Jo Reed: Yeah. We used to say there was no pure space. Lynn Nottage: Yeah, there is no pure space. And I know that makes some people very uncomfortable because they like things to be clean and they want to know ‘you’re the one who did this and this is why it’s happening,’ but I think that – just as Americans – we have to really examine ourselves and examine our complicity in where we’ve ended in 2016 economically, socially, culturally. Reed: I found myself think about the question of blame and this need to blame. To be able to look at somebody and say ‘it’s your fault’. And it’s a tendency to blame whoever is in front of you that’s the least bit different. So Oscar, who works at the bar and who’s Hispanic, comes in for blame. He might have been born in that town, but he’s still an outsider. Lynn Nottage: Right. So he’s electing a man who was born in Burkes, but is not really invited into the mainstream culture because of who he is. He’s always viewed as ‘other.’ And that tension is a tension I experienced when I was doing interviews in Redding. And you talk about blame as – I would ask people ‘well, can you describe your city?’ and everyone would say ‘well, Redding was and it was great until they came.’ And I’m like, ‘who is they?’ and immediately people would point to someone who was different. You know, ‘it was great until the African Americans showed up.’, ‘it was great until the Latinos showed up.’, ‘it was great until the Italians showed up.’ There’s always blame that’s being placed and no one’s examining sort of their own choices and examining what they’ve done to sort of invite people into the community and to protect community because I think that the community is strong once its inclusive. And the community becomes very weak when we begin to ostracize and push people out. Jo Reed: Well this leads to a broader conversation that I just wanted to touch upon. You know there’s so much conversation on diversity and theater. Convenings, etcetera, etcetera. And to my way of thinking, it’s a conversation that’s been going on for quite some time. And I’m wondering: what, if anything, you’ve seen change over the course of your career. Lynn Nottage: The issue of diversity in theater is reflective, I think, of the larger conversation in our culture.  By-and-large it’s not reflective of the mainstream. You take a theater for instance in Washington, DC. and you sit in the audience, it’s predominately white of a certain socioeconomic status. And when you look at the stage, by-and-large you’re seeing plays that reflect the sensibilities and reflect the audiences. And I think one of the problems with diversity in theater is that the management – and I’m talking about artistic directors, I’m talking about managing directors, I’m talking about development people and marketing people – tend to by-and-large be white. And sometimes the performers are people of color and sometimes the plays are written by people of color but I still think that the people who are making those decisions tend to be white. And I think until we have some sort of diversity in those positions, we’re not gonna see real diversity on the stage and we’re not gonna see real diversity in the audiences. So I think that it has to begin, not on the stage but I think it has to begin with the management. And I think that’s true as well when you look at Hollywood, you know, there’s this big discussion about the Oscars being whitewashed, but the fact is you still have an industry that is predominantly white. And you still have people who are making those decisions who are predominantly white and who may think that they are quote unquote ‘doing the right thing’ but they don’t understand that they’re excluding all of these really rich, wonderful voices and that the audience wants that. Jo Reed: Yes, I think that’s right. Theater is hard – it’s hard to make a living as an artist. Did you have more of an issue being taken seriously as a playwright because you’re an African American woman? Lynn Nottage: Yeah, I think so. I still recall people thinking of my writing as a hobby for many, many years and being in the company of people who weren’t in the theater who spoke to me in a condescending way – or even being in the company of people who were in theater and being spoken to in a condescending way because somehow they didn’t value my voice as much as a woman and as a woman of color. And I think that it was a real struggle. It was a battle of attrition to get heard. It’s like, I watched people falling away and I was just like ‘I’m gonna keep at it,’ you know? Every time you knock me down I’m gonna stand back up because I really feel that what I have to say has value and I’m invested in the stories of my mother and I’m invested in the stories of my grandmother and all of the women who raised me and nurtured me. Jo Reed: While your play, Lynn, is based on research, it’s still a work of the imagination. It’s a work of fiction. Can you tell me a little bit about taking all this material and then creating the characters we see on stage at Arena Stage? Lynn Nottage: Sure, one of the things that I love to do as a writer – I think primarily because I’m a master procrasitinator and so my research becomes a part of that procrastination – is that I like to just immerse myself completely in a subject matter. I like to sort of swim in it for a long period of time and then once I’ve sort of come out of the water, I dry off and push it away and then try and remember the things that popped for me. What are those things that I can’t shake out of my memory? And that’s what eventually becomes the play. Jo Reed: Do you have a particular process for writing? Or does it change from play to play? Lynn Nottage: I think for me it changes from play to play. Because I think each play demands a different kind of conversation. And that’s what I find very exciting is that when I ??? Sweat, I know that I’m gonna be getting something that has a completely different process, that’s gonna be really exciting. I try to keep the process stimulating for me because I tend to be very, very restless as a writer. I can’t sit still even when I’m at home and I’m trying to write every 10 minutes I have to get up and sort of circle and then sit back down. I have to walk up and down my steps and I think that my development process tends to be like that. Jo Reed: Do you listen to music while you write? Lynn Nottage: I do. I actually create soundtracks for each of my plays. I can spend, like, a month to 3 weeks developing my soundtrack. Listening to music that I feel defines each of the scenes and I think when you saw the play you heard my soundtrack. <Laughs> That a lot of the music that was used in the transitions is music that I was listening to when I was writing the play. Jo Reed: Give me a few examples. Lynn Nottage: Like, um one of the examples is the Santana song, Smooth. And I don’t know why my mind went there, but somehow I just saw the play bursting with energy with that song which I felt so defined the energy at the beginning of 2000 that began to dissipate over the course of the year. Jo Reed: What drew you to theater? Lynn Nottage: I grew up going to the theater. I grew up in New York City and my parents were people who were always deeply invested in the arts and took me to the theater probably from the time I was 5 years old and I just love the medium. I love the magical way in which the lights would come on and for 2 hours you were in a completely different landscape; and a landscape that was so different from your own. And I think that as I got older, I just wanted to continue to occupy different landscapes. Jo Reed: Film does that as well, but not with the live audience that a theater has. That you’re watching something unfold in front of you. Lynn Nottage: I think film is such a different medium. I think what you get in theater is that it’s totally immersive. Is that when you’re sitting in the audience you feel like you can actually have a conversation with the performers that are on stage. That you can offer them your laughter or your tears and they can feel that energy and in turn give you something back. And I love that theater’s dynamic. Any time you go, it changes. Is that you can go to the same play 10 times in a row and each night it will be absolutely different based upon the energy that is in that room; based upon the energy that the performers bring to the stage. Jo Reed: That leads me to another question: You write Sweat and you have these words on a page. And you create these characters who live in your mind. And then you come to the theater and hand these words to actors. How do you see the play differently then? Because it would seem like almost a birth. Lynn Nottage: Well, I love that moment that moment. That first moment of sitting around the table with a group of actors on the first day of rehearsal and not knowing what the play is going to sound like. Because I’ve spent a year, perhaps even two years, writing a piece of work. And so I, in my head, have heard every single voice the way I wanna hear it. And what I find exciting is like turning it over to this group of actors and having them bring these voices to life I in ways I couldn’t anticipate. In really delightful and wonderful ways. Jo Reed: And as you mentioned, the play shifts again. Something changes when it’s performed in front of an audience. Lynn Nottage: Yeah, but I like to think of – when I write the play it’s like creating a really good meal for a dinner party. It’s like, I’ve created the meal and then I set it on the table and I’ve invited all of these guests to sit with me and then it becomes something entirely different based on how they season the food and based on the conversation that occurs at the dinner table. In some ways, I can just push back and let this thing take a life of its own. Jo Reed: I love that analogy. I think it’s great. This play was commissioned by Arena Stage and by the Oregon Shakespeare Festival to be part of the series called “American Revolutions: The US History Cycle.” What is that? Can you explain what that is? Lynn Nottage: Well, the way that it was broached to me when I was invited to write a play for this very, very ambitious series is that they felt as though American plays were shrinking. And they wanted to create space where we could talk about the enormous revolutions that have happened in our culture. And they asked us as playwrights to dream big. You know, you could have 24 characters. They wanted to create bodies of work that reflected the immensity of ideas and the immensities of change that has occurred over the course of the last two, three hundred years in America. And when I was approached, I spent a lot of time thinking. And it was really – the program’s wonderful because they, you know, they’d hold these forums where they’d bring historians who would talk about different revolutions and would talk about history. And at some point, I thought ‘I’m really interested in writing about the de-industrial revolution.’ I’m really interested in this moment in time. We’ve had the seismic shift in our culture that, in 200 years – or in less, in like 50 years –we’ll look back and say, ‘that was a moment of real change.’ And if the de-industrial revolution. Reed: You know, I find it very interesting that we as a culture tend to hold fast to the idea of the artist laboring in solitude. As if any artist is removed from the social, cultural, and political world they inhabit. And somehow there’s this myth that art isn’t supposed to reflect that world, but has to be above that. And if it’s not, it’s labeled a political play. And 99 times out of 100, when it’s said it’s a political play, it is not meant as a good thing. Lynn Nottage: It is true, which I find problematic. Somehow, and I don’t know at what moment in our culture it occurred, that political theater was seen as something lesser. That if you were actively engaged in trying to have a conversation with the culture, you were doing something wrong. You know, we should be writing plays about the dysfunctions of families. We should be writing about little, tiny, microscopic work that takes place on the couches or in the bedroom that’s just about human emotion. And I say that we should be writing plays about all those things and then more. You know, I think that it’s when we as artists don’t keep our eyes open and when we choose not to be actively in dialogue with what’s happening in society. I think that the culture begins to reflect that. And I think that it does reflect that. Jo Reed: Clearly plays take a long time. You researched for two years. And then there’s time for development and then you go into production and yadda, yadda, yadda. But as it happens, Sweat is opening in 2016 which is an election year. Lynn Nottage: Right, which is great. Which is great. I would love for the play to be part of the discussion that candidates have. I mean, I think that labor is a dirty word in the mouths of a lot of politicians. <Laughs> I would love for a lot of politicians, and the candidates, as they’re discussing the economy that they think about the working man. And they think about the impact of NAFTA. And they think about what they’re going to do with a class of folks who don’t have opportunity and who want to work. I mean, where are those jobs going to come from? Reed: I know you teach at Columbia in the theater department and you teach a class you call, “American Spectacle.” Tell me a little bit about that. Lynn Nottage: I teach a course which is called “American Spectacle” looking at theater outside of the proscenium. And I think that I began developing this class out of frustration that we were designing work for the proscenium. And specifically for the prosceniums with a certain sensibility, which was the sensibility of what we discussed earlier of by-and-large white artistic directors; for white audiences. And I said, ‘well, why as theater artists are we limiting ourselves to a space like the proscenium?” Why can’t we think larger? And so the class is really looking at the way in which theater has developed in America and other spaces. So we look at the American sideshow and we look at church and we look at courtrooms. We look at protests. We look at museum spaces. We look at the ways in which theater is happening at other spaces outside of the proscenium. And it tends to be more populous spaces and spaces that are more accessible to people. I want my students to just think more expansively. Don’t be limited by the proscenium. Jo Reed: Lynn Nottage, thank you so much. Lynn Nottage: Well, thank you. Jo Reed: Thank you for your writing. It’s made a big difference to me, so truly, thank you. Lynn Nottage: Thank you so much. Reed: That’s playwright, Lynn Nottage. Sweat is running at Washington, D.C.’s Arena Stage through February 21^st. You’ve been listening to Art Works, produced at the National Endowment for the Arts. To find out how art works in communities across the country, keep checking the Art Works blog or follow us @NEAarts on Twitter. For the National Endowment for the Arts, I’m Josephine Reed. Thanks for listening.