From PRX.

The following Studio 360 podcast contains explicit language.

This is Studio 360. I'm Kurti Anderson.

When I started at the plant, it felt like I was invited into an exclusive club.

Not many of us folks worked there. Not us.

So when I put on my jacket, I knew I'd accomplished something.

On this Studio 360 podcast extra, we're talking about sweat. The play by Lynn Notage that won the Pulitzer Prize for drama last year.

I was set.

And when I got my union card, you couldn't tell me anything.

Sometimes when I was shopping, I would let it slip out of my wallet onto the counter, just so folks could see it.

Here's what Lynn Notage had to say about the project on a video on the public theater website.

For me, began with a friend of mine who was a single mom of two who wrote me an email, explaining her situation.

She found herself after working most of her life and being solidly middle class without a job

and for six months without any real resources and it really broke my heart.

So I really set about to figure out how poverty and economic stagnation was really

shifting the American narrative. And this was in 2011. And I began doing research and we came across

a city called Reading, Pennsylvania.

This could be like a real rich city, but it's not. It's a poor city. The city's poor, the streets are messed up,

everything is messed up. There's no money. Everybody's getting laid off, everybody's.

So what does that make you feel about your own future? Nothing's better ready to get a future.

Where I'm into when I was trying to find normalcy, red in Pennsylvania, something sad to see the media is even talking shit on where I grew up and it screwed up because nobody from my city ever blew up.

The play wild people in New York, first off Broadway at the public theater, then on Broadway.

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