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March 26, 2017

The bar that is the principal location for “Sweat,” Lynn Nottage’s bracingly topical portrait of American dreams deferred in working-class Pennsylvania, is a place where friendships go to die. Sure, it looks awfully cozy and welcoming, and you can see why its denizens regard it as a second home.

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New York Daily News
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Jeo
Dziemianowicz

March 26, 2017

Broadway plays don’t get much more topical than “Sweat,” a portrait of lost American dreamers adrift in an economic wasteland. At Studio 54, the play grabs you with its ripped-from-the-headlines social and political resonance. It also loses its grip due to predictability and a miscalibrated staging.

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March 26, 2017

The core message of Lynn Nottage’s wake-up social tragedy Sweat is clarion clear and to share it does not spoil the show: We must help each other or we’re dead. Whether that means the rich pay more, the poor get health care or trans people enjoy greater legal protections, we have to unite these states. Nottage’s passionate and necessary drama, which transferred to Broadway after a run last year at the Public Theater, is a masterful depiction of the forces that divide and conquer us.

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Entertainment Weekly
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Caitlin
Brody

March 26, 2017

Change is never easy, but for the residents of Reading, Pennsylvania, change means nothing short of utter demise. Sweat, a compelling new play from Lynn Nottage (Intimate Apparel and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Ruined) takes place between 2000 and 2008, and follows the lives of three 40something women and two of their sons whose worlds have consisted of factory floors, stale cigarettes and shots of whiskey for generations. Guzzling watery beer and passing out into a drool-filled state at the local bar is just another day after work, much like their fathers and grandfathers experienced before them, and there’s pride in that. Sweat is a fascinating study of class and opportunity, or lack thereof.

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March 26, 2017

Still wondering how Donald Trump managed to win over working-class voters by promising to bring back manufacturing jobs? Take a look at “Sweat,” Lynn Nottage’s timely, empathetic and critical-minded drama about how the shutdown of a factory in Reading, Pennsylvania, leads to the breakdown of friendship and family, and a devastating cycle of violence, prejudice, poverty and drugs.

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