Three Readings of Reading, Pennsylvania: Approaching Lynn Nottage’s Sweat and Douglas Carter Beane’s Shows for Days

Intimations of Precarity in Twenty-First-Century U.S. Drama: Faltering Voices of the Precariat in Annie Baker’s The Flick

“…Unlike this intensely metaphysical American drama of the first decade of the new millennium, the theatre of the second decade, with its attention "to the 'here and now' social realities of a recognizable world" (Aston 2016), became instead distinctly realistic and this formal and aesthetic turn can be seen as expressive of the growing awareness of that dimension of the precarious (Lorey, 2015), precarity, that serves to foreground the "material conditions that facilitate and maintain the uneven distribution of vulnerability and management of precarious life" (Fragkou 2019: 6). Among the plays that explore and negotiate the human costs exacted by job losses, declining wages and "the interpersonal devastation caused by the collapse of the American industry" (Mohler;McMahon and Román, 2016: 79) the following shall be singled out: Lisa D'Amour's Detroit (2010); Annie Baker's The Aliens (2010) and The Flick (2013); Stephen Karam's The Humans (2014); Lynn Nottage's Sweat (2015) and Martina Majok's Cost of Living (2016). Three of them were awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama: The Flick in 2014, Sweat in 2017, and Cost of Living in 2018.…”

“…Only Lynn Nottage's Sweat, in its historic exploration of the disenfranchisement of blue-collar workers, overtly addresses governmental precarization and points to the neoliberal demolition and restructuring of the collective security system of unions as a tragic event. Given its reliance on the structure of classical tragedy as a most suitable framing to understand the interplay between human responsibility and outside forces governing our fate, the play was unambiguously perceived as insisting on the fact that the "loss of employment and the fear of poverty are tragic" (Mohler;McMahon and Román 2016: 94). On the contrary, the plays of Karam, Baker and D'Amour depict the often precipitous and enforced adjustment to the transformations brought about by the dissolution "of optimistic objects/scenarios that had once held the space open for the good-life fantasy" (Berlant, 2011: 3) in a more indirect way, veering to understatement instead.…”