![]() So it was fascinating sitting with these white steelworkers who had taken for granted their privilege and seeing them humbled and seeing them understand something about the world in a very different way.” As a woman of color, my life has been defined by struggle, by feeling marginalized, by constantly having to assert my voice and be seen. “I think that people of color are very easy scapegoats. “When they’re faced with hardship, Tracey and Cynthia’s friendship is really tested, not just along economic lines but racial lines,” says Nottage says, whose “Fabulation or, the Re-Education of Undine” will be produced by Lyric Stage Company this spring. Caught between this chasm are Tracey and Cynthia’s sons, Jason and Chris, who’ve been friends since childhood. Eventually, the union workers are locked out, and racial resentments rise to the surface. The tension worsens when the company starts laying off workers to ship jobs to Mexico. But when Cynthia lands a management position that Tracey had also applied for, Tracey accuses her of betrayal. Tracey, who is white, and Cynthia, who is black, have been friends for more than 20 years, working alongside each other on the assembly line and even taking vacations together. The fictional story of “Sweat” centers on a group of steelworker friends who hang out at a nearby bar after hours. And what happens to them and their community when we don’t have access to the American Dream anymore? What does that do to you emotionally?” says Nottage, who won her first Pulitzer, in 2009, for “Ruined.” To research that play, she had taken a similar approach, interviewing Congolese women who’d been victimized in the country’s civil war. “The story is about people who’ve invested in the American Dream, who had a set of assumptions about what they were entitled to. “Sweat” was partially inspired by Nottage’s conversations with a group of steelworkers who’d been locked out of a metal-tubing plant for 93 weeks. "Something that they sat back at with a level of distance and amusement became much more relevant. "The audience response to the play the day before the election and the day after shifted dramatically," Nottage says. Critics and audiences pointed to the play, set in the years 20 as globalization and outsourcing decimated manufacturing across the country, as getting to the heart of the disaffection and anger that they believe had fueled Donald Trump’s election. Those interviews formed the backbone of “Sweat,” which opened at the Public Theater off-Broadway just a few days before the 2016 presidential election, then transferred to Broadway the following spring. Over the course of the next 2½ years, Nottage traveled to Reading often, speaking with a diverse array of residents. So how could a city that was thriving and so alive wither like a grape on the vine?” “For many years, Reading had welcomed immigrants from all over the world, and those immigrants could literally get off the bus and within an hour have a job. “I wanted to find a city that was a microcosm of what was happening to America as a whole,” Nottage says. Nottage’s quest eventually led her to Reading, Pa., which had been described in a 2011 news story as the poorest American city of its size - with 41.3 percent of its approximately 88,000 residents living in poverty. I had to actually go and find that story for myself.” “But I realized there’s a much bigger story that couldn’t be answered by the people sitting in the circle. “I lost my voice from shouting,” she says with a laugh. At one point, she gave a fiery address to the assembled throng. ![]() As Nottage heard stories of financial hardship and critiques of the nation’s growing inequality, her anger rose. Not long after, Nottage took that friend to the Occupy Wall Street protests in Manhattan. It was an all-too-familiar story of economic anxiety and job loss that was playing out across the country in the wake of the recession and foreclosure crisis. “She had felt too embarrassed to share her predicament. I just need you guys to know what I’m going through,’ ” Nottage recalls in a recent conversation over breakfast at a cafe near her home in the Boerum Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn, where she grew up. to me and a couple of other friends, saying, ‘I’m broke. ![]() The friend revealed to Nottage that she’d been out of work for a long time and was now struggling to make ends meet. NEW YORK - In 2011, the playwright Lynn Nottage received a letter from a friend, a single mother of two who lived on her Brooklyn block, that crystallized the depth of the country’s crippling economic downturn and its effects on the middle class.
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