By: Lynn Nottage
Directed by: Jacob Clark Boggs

Lynn Nottage's Sweat gives us characters filled with the good and the bad. Nottage never tells us who's right or who's wrong, but always shows us who's human. And while its trajectory is dark, even devastating, Sweat is damn funny, too: Nottage knows well that the natural reactions to the assaults of life faced by these particular people are a savage sense of humor, and, more damagingly, a swan dive into the comforts of alcohol and drugs. Sweat (set in Reading, PA) moves fluidly between these passages (and others set elsewhere but at the same time) and scenes from eight years before, when the bulk of the action takes place. In the foreground of these scenes, set in a bar favored by the blue collar workers of the local metal tubing plant, are three middle-aged women, fast friends who together have put in more than 60 years working machines on the factory floor.