Sweat

Sweat

Lynn Nottage

Palo Alto Players

Stories are how we often best learn new truths about the world around us.  Lynn Nottage — the first and only woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama two times — clearly understands the power of narratives to deliver messages and to raise questions that we in the mostly liberal and Blue Bay Area somehow have missed while watching CNN, reading Facebook, or listening to NPR.  In 2011, she went to the Rust Belt to interview everyday people whose lives were being upended by the shuttering of factories that had served their communities for generations.  What she learned in those conversations led her to pen a script, Sweat, that tells all one needs to know in order to to understand the depth of pain, disillusionment, hopelessness and anger that many people still feel to this day in states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Michigan.  Palo Alto Players opens a raw, gritty, honest-to-the-core production of Sweat with a cast’s performances that grab you with a firm grip, shake you to the core, and leave you a different person than when you entered Lucie Stern Theatre.

For the rest of my review, please proceed to Talkin’Broadway.

Rating: 5 E

A TheatreEddys Best Bet Production

Sweat continues through June 29, 2025,, in in a two-hour, thirty-minute (with one intermission) production by Palo Alto Players at Lucie Stern Theatre, 1305 Middlefield Road, Palo Alto, CA.  Tickets are available online at www.paplayers.org or by calling the Box Office at 650-329-0891.

Photo Credit: Scott Lasky