Lynn Nottage and Kate Whoriskey Talk to David Remnick About Putting Trump's America Onstage
The Political Scene | The New Yorker
The New Yorker
4.3 • 3.9K Ratings
🗓️ 3 April 2017
⏱️ 21 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The playwright Lynn Nottage and the director Kate Whoriskey travelled to Reading, Pennsylvania, to conduct interviews about the impact that the decline of manufacturing jobs had on lives in the declining factory town. Nottage’s play “Sweat,” which was inspired by those interviews, depicts rising racial tension in a small town like Reading as opportunities decline. Nottage talks with David Remnick about the work’s relationship to Donald Trump.
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| 1:11.7 | I'm Dorothy Wickend. On today's Politics and More podcast, David Remnec talks to the |
| 1:17.6 | playwright Lynn Notting and the director Kate Warisky about sweat, which recently opened |
| 1:22.9 | on Broadway. The play examines the effects of deindustrialization on a factory town. |
| 1:30.3 | A few years ago, the playwright Lynn Notting, a winner of the Pulitzer Prize, began working on a play set in Redding, Pennsylvania. |
| 1:38.3 | Reading is an old factory town, where the manufacturing jobs have been drying up for years, and in their place, there's |
| 1:46.1 | unemployment, poverty, and outlet malls. |
| 1:50.0 | Notage, whose black, was interested in how racial tension is linked to economic hardship, |
| 1:55.2 | and she tells that story through three working-class women, along with their sons, |
| 1:59.6 | the owner of the bar they hang out in, |
| 2:01.6 | and the bus boy. The play is called Sweat, and it premiered in 2015, and over the last year, |
| 2:09.0 | as the presidential campaign of Donald Trump gathered steam, pitting the frustration of the white |
| 2:13.2 | working class against minorities and immigrants,at began to look remarkably prescient. |
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