In a Bar in Reading PA, Eight Lives are Upended by an Acronym
No amount of beer or bourbon can dispel the fear of displacement
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The playwright tells us the bar is lived-in and comfortable. The bar tender is a guy called Stan who limps from an injury at work. The busboy is a guy called Oscar whose jobs include unsticking the gum from beneath the tables. He likes to hang out by the doorway and smoke. “This is my space.”
Inside is everyone else’s space: the regulars drink beer, bourbon, champagne and gimlets (gin and lime); they hug, dance, fight, and celebrate birthdays; they bump into exes they didn’t want to see; and — not infrequently — get very, very drunk.
It’s an insular world. The regulars talk about exotic trips round the Caribbean or the Greek islands or through the Panama Canal with “poolside pina colada”. Once, when she was younger, one of them planned on doing the hippy trail: “Istanbul, Tehran, Kandahar, Peshawar, Lahore, Kathmandu”. It never happened.
Everything that leads to the violence in Lynn Nottage’s Sweat happens in one of only four locations and none of them is in this bar.
One is the factory floor, where they stand all day, the machinery churning to the smell of oil and metal dust, without any air-conditioning. They’ve been there since they left school. Generations have worked on the floor: grandpas, dads, mums, sons, daughters. Their entire lives depend on things carrying on just as they are.
Two is the building next to “the floor” which might as well be the other side of the world. It has air-conditioning. People leave work in clean clothes. Some of the white hats have MBAs from Wharton and think the floor can be be run by “five and a half people”. You can work on the floor 25 years and never meet them.
Three is the Centro Hispano. The “what?”, asks one of the regulars. It’s the Latino Community Center where leaflets go up in Spanish saying the plant is recruiting packers and shippers and you don’t need to belong to a union to apply. Oscar, who’s Columbian, discovers that packing and shipping pays three dollars an hour more than hauling glasses and unsticking gum from tables.
