A coal sweat

Sweat premiered at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in 2015.

You can’t take a ride on the Reading Railroad anymore. It went out of business in 1976, as coal-hauling revenues in eastern Pennsylvania plummeted. It may not have seemed so at the time, but it was a harbinger of the de-industrialization of the Rust Belt, which had an apocalyptic impact on Reading itself over the next 40 years.

By the time playwright Lynn Nottage first visited the city in 1991, it was officially one of America’s poorest communities, with a poverty rate exceeding 40%. She spent more than two years conducting research and interviewing residents whose lives and friendships had been fractured as the factories shut down. Sweat, the resulting play, is the Santa Fe Playhouse’s next production, with performances beginning on Thursday, May 11.

A coal sweat

The “de-industrial revolution” left many factories in Reading, Pennsylvania, abandoned.

 
A coal sweat

Clockwise from top left: Danielle Louise Reddick; Kate Udall; playwright Lynn Nottage; Robyn Rikoon, artistic director of Santa Fe Playhouse and stage director of Sweat. Photos courtesy Santa Fe Playhouse

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