After waiting two years due to the pandemic, Paramount Theatre is finally launching its new BOLD Series with the Pulitzer Prize-winning play “Sweat” at the Copley Theatre in the North Island Center in Aurora.
Although The Second City National Touring Company performed its Holiday Revue at the Copley in November and December of 2021, “Sweat” will be the first play performed in the new space.
Director Andrea J Dymond does not feel any added stress because “Sweat” won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
“I do not feel any additional pressure,” Dymond said. “It’s a beautiful play. I’m excited to be doing the inaugural performance in the theater.”
“Sweat” is a 2015 play by American playwright Lynn Nottage. It takes place in a fictional bar in Reading, Pennsylvania, in the year 2008. Factory worker friends in this impoverished American town, laugh, talk, and drink their cares away.
But their lives are about to be uprooted. The steel mill at which they work is making some changes and the blood, sweat and tears of the workers don’t seem to amount to much. When promotions and layoffs are rumored, tensions and jealousy begin to rip apart their community.
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“The show is about the human cost of capitalism and the pressures put on relationships and community,” Dymond said. “It is an intimate story about community and friendship.”
“Sweat” will be presented at 1:30 p.m. and 7 p.m. Wednesdays; 7 p.m. Thursdays; 8 p.m. Fridays; 2 p.m. and 8 p.m. Saturdays; and 1 p.m. and 5:30 p.m. Sundays from March 9 to April 24 at the Copley Theatre in Aurora. The show is for ages 16 and up due to strong adult language, racial slurs, violence and political content.
Nottage began working on the play in 2011. She interviewed numerous residents of Reading, which at the time was, according to several sources, one of the poorest cities in America, with a poverty rate of more than 40%. The play also is set at a time in American industry when many long-standing factory jobs were being outsourced elsewhere.
“It is also a story about unions,” Dymond said. “People know about jobs going away. Working-class people know about these struggles.”
The play was produced off-Broadway in 2016 and on Broadway in 2017. “Sweat” was awarded the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and received three 2017 Tony Award nominations, including Best Play.
The plot of “Sweat” starts in the year 2008 and flashes back to the year 2000.
“The story is told in an intimate space in a bar,” Dymond said. “We carve out the flashbacks mostly with lighting and furniture.”
One of challenges of presenting a play in the new $2-million renovation of the 165-seat Copley Theatre is adjusting to new things.
“We are learning about the space; what we can do and what we can’t do in these surroundings,” Dymond said.
“You direct for the space you are in,” she continued. “I have worked in a lot of Chicago theaters that are intimate, like Victory Gardens Theater and other theaters. It’s exciting for a storyteller. The audience is right there with you. It adds a level of engagement.”
As is sometimes the case, the Reading bar and surrounding community depicted in “Sweat” is a microcosm of a larger world.
“The story is so universal,” Dymond said. “It’s about struggles that we all have. You could go to the streets of America anywhere and it would be the same story. I believe we should look at people as people. The point is to recognize that ugly pieces of ourselves do exist. But it is all of us in it together. The goal is to look at each of us human beings.”
‘Sweat’
When: March 9-April 24
Where: Copley Theatre, 8 E. Galena Blvd., Aurora
Tickets: $67-$74
Information: 630-896-6666; paramountaurora.com
Randall G. Mielke is a freelance reporter for The Beacon-News