The writer who foresaw the Trump era

Days before the last US election, Lynn Nottage’s play Sweat opened off-Broadway – telling a story of working-class disaffection that was supremely on-the-money, writes Alexis Soloski.

In the weeks before the 2016 US presidential election, polling strongly favoured Hillary Clinton. The playwright Lynn Nottage wasn’t so sure. Nottage had made frequent visits to Reading, Pennsylvania, while researching a play about the de-industrial revolution. She and her interns had talked to hundreds of people in that swing state. Few of them were thrilled by Clinton.

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In some of those conversations, white interviewees spoke of cultural divides, economic disintegration and a suspicion of the town’s Latinx citizens, particularly recent immigrants. “It's all the things that Trump ran on,” Nottage tells BBC Culture. “I could feel the toxicity.”

Those conversations inspired and undergirded Sweat, a rangy, intricate drama, set in a fading steel town, that won Nottage her second Pulitzer Prize. Though researched and written during Barack Obama’s presidency, Sweat, which opened at New York City’s Public Theater days before the 2016 election, became a definitive work of Donald Trump’s. In a 2017 profile of Nottage, the New Yorker called the play “the first theatrical landmark of the Trump era.”

Nottage began working on the play in 2011 when she received a commission from the Oregon Shakespeare Festival for its American Revolutions series of new plays about “moments of change in US history”. She chose the country’s recent de-industrial revolution, the decline of the US manufacturing sector which began in the 1970s and reverberates today, as her topic. She had recently received an email from a friend, a single mother who confessed that she had spent months in dire economic straits. “It broke my heart that she didn't feel like she could reach out to us sooner,” Nottage says. “I thought, ‘What does that say about us as a community that people have to hide when they're in economic distress?’”

But she wanted to think about distress in broader terms. After a day spent with her friend at Occupy Wall Street, she began looking for a canvas for her play and hit upon Reading, a former industrial centre, in an effort to see how the loss of industry reverberated throughout citizens’ lives. After dozens of visits over two years, Nottage put her research aside, and sat down to write Sweat.

Her research had pointed her toward the schisms dividing modern America, showing how abruptly communities can fracture along fault lines of race and class. While writing the play she felt as though she had a hammer in her hand. “I was really angry that people were not awake, “ she says. “I wanted to, like, hit people and say, ‘Hello? Do you see what I see?’”

Shifting between 2000 and 2008, Sweat explores how the shuttering of factories devastates a community. Set mostly in and around a nameless bar frequented by the workers at a steel-tubing manufacturing plant, it centres on Tracey, who is white, and Cynthia, who is black. “When I put on my jacket, I knew I’d accomplished something,” says Cynthia, who has worked at the plant for two decades, reminiscing about happier times. “I was set. And when I got my union card, you couldn’t tell me anything. Sometimes when I was shopping I would let it slip out of my wallet onto the counter just so folks could see it.”

When Cynthia moves up to management and the plant, already eager to outsource work to Mexico, threatens to lock out its floor workers unless they take a 60% pay cut, the longtime friendship between her and Tracey shatters and racism rears its head. Meanwhile the women’s sons, recent hires, feel so disenfranchised by the lock out that they commit an act of terrible violence. Nottage has always written about marginalised characters, like the trafficked women of her 2007 play Ruined or the neglected seamstress of 2003’s Intimate Apparel. But here she took on people who never knew they were marginal, who still believed they belonged to the centre.

Sweat had its world premiere at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in 2015, when the idea of a Trump presidency seemed like a joke, even a funny one. The following summer it went to the Arena Stage in Washington DC. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg saw it twice. “I remember [her] little frail body, sitting in the audience and standing up at the end,” Nottage says. By the time of its off-Broadway run in the fall, the political landscape had shifted and Sweat appeared not only trenchant, but also prescient, a canary in the coal mine - or in this case, a steel-tube factory - predicting how and why swing states swung red.

After the election, the mood in the theatre changed. “Suddenly people understood for the first time what the play was about,” Nottage said. The actors could sense it, even as they worried how the mostly liberal audience would respond to these characters. “They felt scared and charged at the same [time],” Nottage says. “It’s that strange thing in theatre, when the art suddenly meets the moment.” It subsequently transferred to Broadway for a  2017 run, with the moment still met.

Making art in this moment, in and for the Trump era, can feel paradoxical. In a marked contrast to Obama, America’s sitting president doesn’t read for pleasure and doesn’t write much beyond the characters of Twitter. When that New Yorker piece came out, Nottage had mixed feelings. “I was like, oooh, ‘I don’t want it only tied to Trump.’ It felt like it was polluting the artwork,” she says.

In 2018, Sweat went on tour in America’s Rust Belt, visiting 18 cities in five swing states, provoking conversations. It remained and remains uniquely relevant. It also stands as one of the first and finest works to examine ‘white fragility’: the concept coined by author Robin D’Angelo to refer to the difficult relationships that white people have with the notion that they move through the world with privilege, even if they are working class. “It shouldn’t be called Black History Month, it should be called ‘Make White People Feel Guilty Month,’” Jason, Tracey’s son, says in the play.

And since Sweat opened, other significant works have emerged exploring what it means when a culture values white male lives above all others and how brutally this impacts women and communities of colour. In theatre, these works include Jackie Sibblies Drury’s Fairview, Antoinette Nwandu’s Pass Over, Aleshea Harris’s What to Send Up When it Goes Down and Will Arbery’s Heroes of the Fourth Turning. The Trump presidency has also brought new relevance to works written, as Sweat was, during the Obama years, such as Anais Mitchell’s Hadestown and Heidi Schreck’s What the Constitution Means to Me. If few are as capacious or anthropologically minded as Sweat, most are as devastating.

Having predicted the result of the last US presidential election, does Nottage have any idea how this one will go? Not when she speaks via Zoom in early October, just after the announcement of the president’s Covid-19 diagnosis. “Who the hell knows how this is going to go?” she says. “I think it's going to be one for the ages.”

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