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Monday, September 06, 2021
Theater Question for Labor Day: Does the Reckoning Over Race + Class = Intriguing New Plays About Workers and Workplaces?
New York Theater: Where are the American plays about unions, or workers, or even just workplaces? I started asking that question several years ago on Labor Day, a legal holiday created by Congress in 1884 to celebrate the labor union movement.
There is a reason plays about the working class can resonate with so many. I remember reading Lynn Nottage's Sweat, one example brought up in the list of plays in the article, during colloquium my first year and feeling a level of empathy for the characters. Part of the project in question was designing the show, and I found myself doing the sound design portion. I ended up using Billy Joel's Allentown as a centerpiece of the design, since that song is also about working class individuals struggling in a post-industrial Pennsylvania town. The similarities were strikingly similar even though they were two completely different locations. The struggles of the working class seeing their jobs go away, seeing unions fail in the face of large companies willing to sell out their workers for profit, and the sense of helplessness is something I think we are all closer to than we may think. The author notes if the past year would result in "more art about workers on stage", and I think the answer is yes. Arts workers themselves experienced the fragility of our industry, and how quickly we can feel alone and abandon, much like the characters in Sweat.
1 comment:
There is a reason plays about the working class can resonate with so many. I remember reading Lynn Nottage's Sweat, one example brought up in the list of plays in the article, during colloquium my first year and feeling a level of empathy for the characters. Part of the project in question was designing the show, and I found myself doing the sound design portion. I ended up using Billy Joel's Allentown as a centerpiece of the design, since that song is also about working class individuals struggling in a post-industrial Pennsylvania town. The similarities were strikingly similar even though they were two completely different locations. The struggles of the working class seeing their jobs go away, seeing unions fail in the face of large companies willing to sell out their workers for profit, and the sense of helplessness is something I think we are all closer to than we may think. The author notes if the past year would result in "more art about workers on stage", and I think the answer is yes. Arts workers themselves experienced the fragility of our industry, and how quickly we can feel alone and abandon, much like the characters in Sweat.
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