In today’s Wall Street Journal drama column I review two New York openings, the Public Theater transfer of Lynn Nottage’s Sweat and a Broadway revival of Les Liaisons Dangereuses. Here’s an excerpt.
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Lynn Nottage, the author of “Ruined” and “Intimate Apparel,” is as fine a playwright as America has, and “Sweat,” her latest effort, has come to New York’s Public Theater at a breathtakingly timely moment. Ms. Nottage’s subject, which she dramatizes with raw passion and searching moral consciousness, is the daily life of the unionized factory workers of Reading, the Pennsylvania town whose name has become a byword for working-class unemployment in the age of deindustrialization. Donald Trump, whose presidential candidacy was still coming into focus when “Sweat” was first performed at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in the summer of 2015, naturally goes unmentioned in the play, which is set between 2000 and 2008. Still, the issues that Mr. Trump rode to the top of the Republican ticket were every bit as salient then as now…
The Public’s production of “Sweat” is a remount of Kate Whoriskey’s fire-eating Oregon production, which subsequently transferred to the Arena Stage in Washington, D.C. The cast has changed, in all cases for the better—the stylistic unanimity of Ms. Whoriskey’s new ensemble of actors is awe-inspiring—but the play itself, which mostly takes place in a blue-collar bar in Reading, is substantially the same one I saw in Oregon. It is the story of a group of striking workers whose employers, motivated by the North American Free Trade Agreement, are moving their plant to Mexico. The workers are terrified, not just because they’re out of work (or about to be) but because their jobs are their lives, a fundamental source of their personal identity. Without jobs, who are they—and what will they become?…
“Les Liaisons Dangereuses,” Christopher Hampton’s skillful 1985 theatrical adaptation of Choderlos de Laclos’ 1782 epistolary novel about a pair of high-born immoralists, is back on Broadway for the third time. I don’t see why. Effective as it is, I don’t think the play merits being revived at intervals of less than a decade. A great staging might have tipped the scales, but this one, which originated last year at London’s Donmar Warehouse, is no better than the Roundabout Theatre Company’s stillborn 2008 version. Josie Rourke, the director, and Janet McTeer and Liev Schreiber, the stars, seem not to realize that for most of its length, “Liaisons” is a high comedy about two lost souls who end up in hell. The acting is consistently unsubtle and unfunny…
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To read my review of Sweat, go here.
To read my review of Les Liaisons Dangereuses, go here.
The trailer for the 2015 Oregon Shakespeare Festival premiere of Sweat: