Reading into Reading

 

Reading into Reading

How empathetic are you? I mean, of course, you're empathetic, you're understanding and caring and kind and whatnot, but how truly empathetic are you? This is the core introspective question asked by Lynn Nottage's play, Sweat. It asks the audience to legitimately question their sense of empathy and understanding by forcing the audience to focus on the unknown and unseen of society, questioning the audience and characters on how much they try to understand people in different social situations than them. Sweat builds to this core question with a specific creative blend of contrast, colloquialisms, and symbolism.

At the start of every chapter in the play, there's a brief description of what happened that day. The description is made up of two halves, one half explains what happened in global or national news that day, the other half mentioning whatever small incident or event happened that day in the book's main setting of Reading, Pennsylvania.

The play uses these two halves of the description for obvious contrast, continuously emphasizing how the country or world is plagued by economic troubles, meanwhile the town of Reading has small communal events despite its economically poor makeup. The very first description perfectly highlights this, contrasting how the "Dow Jones Industrial Average falls 778.68 points, marking the largest single-day decline in stock market history" (Nottage, 5) while Reading serves "fresh apple cider at the Annual Fall Festival on Old Dry Road Farm." (Nottage 5).

Reading, despite its poor status and economical-struggling population, seems far less bothered by economic hardship than the United States is. The United States is experiencing the Recession of 2008 and has made it a national headline, throwing the entire country into disarray, yet the people of Reading in a near-eternal recession are completely calm and collected. The story is contrasting how the people at the top, the government officials, the investors, the economic experts, etc. all bemoan when faced with economic struggle themselves, yet the people who live in economic hardship do not have this same childish response. 

Many of the other descriptions have this same contrasting relationship, the rich make it national news when they face economic hardship, yet the people who live in poverty everyday go about their life, not trying to embellish or complain about their pain. It's national news when "Steve Forbes drops out of the Republican Party after investing $66,000,000 of his own money" (Nottage, 28) but no one cares when "The City of Reading fires a dozen employees, fearing a deficit of $10,000,000". (Nottage, 50) 

One of the most telling descriptions is for Scene 4, contrasting how it's national news that a protest "disrupts the World Bank" (Nottage, 45) yet only a local occurrence that "A 26-year-old man is shot leaving a bar on Woodward Street in Reading." (Nottage, 45) A protest is deemed more important than a murder, a non-violent and non-lethal protest is apparently more valued than a human life, and one that was mercilessly and senselessly gunned down, no less.

Sweat makes a repeated contrast between the lives of the rich and the lives of the poor, showing how the poor are unseen and unheard of in society, their stories never being covered. In comparison, the rich are all that the news focuses on, and they're the ones who play victim when faced with poverty for half a second, the same poverty that the poor live with every day.

This use of contrast not only illustrates how the poor are outcasts, invisible in society, but also how the poor and rich have no connection or unity between them. The rich make such a big deal when faced with the conditions of the poor, because they have never understood or lived through what it's like to be poor, making them incapable of understanding that their rare economic slip-ups are the lives of others. Yet on the other side, the poor are incapable to understand that the upper class's mistakes trickle down to them because the poor are so consumed in their struggle to live another day that they fail to try and look at the rich or the bigger picture and understand that the Dow Jones falling or a protest on the World Bank will eventually affect them too.

Both sides are so consumed in their own economic being that they fail to look at the other and try to understand their position, it's a question for the rich audience in the galleries and the poor characters in the play to grapple with. Yet this divide between economic classes is only highlighted through their different manners of speaking.

 

Sweat uses the different language between economic classes to emphasize the lack of understanding or unity between each class, specifically though each class's unique colloquialisms that define their language.

The poor members of Reading use improper and unprofessional words in their everyday speech, establishing them as both dirty and unprofessional along with establishing them as uneducated and empty-headed. They use slang words like "Phat" (Nottage, 28), making the poor seem improper through their use of slang and lingo and their inability to use the proper dictionary-defined words for what they're trying to convey.

The poor members of Reading also use illegitimate compounds of words, like "gotta" (Nottage, 93)  and "useta" (Nottage, 11), portraying the residents of Reading as incompetent or impatient, as they all seem to be unable to properly say words that they want or are always trying to speed up conversations instead of having slow, philosophical, substantial tirades like the rich are associated to do.

The play even has the characters use abbreviations, making them seem dumber and unintelligent since the characters can’t say the full name or pronunciation of something and are only capable of saying a shortened version of something, like saying "K" (Nottage, 38) instead of the full version of the word as "ok".

All these various quirks of Reading's dialect make the poor residents of the town seem dumb or unprofessional or incompetent, portraying their colloquialisms as though they are a bad thing that makes the townsfolk come across as stupid or improper.

And when the more distinguished and dignified words of the upper class are used in the story, the poor seem unable to understand or comprehend them. 

When complicated and educated terms are presented, like the North America Free Trade Agreement, the poor are presented as ruining and butchering the word, along with being unable to comprehend it. They reduce the North America Free Trade Agreement to just "NAFTA", reinforcing the idea that the poor abbreviate words because they are so dumb and incompetent that they cannot even say the full term or word and instead have to abbreviate it for them to understand as they turn the complicated phrase of North America Free Trade Agreement to NAFTA, ruining its original intended definition. The play also emphasizes that the poor do not understand these complicated, education-associated words, as the residents of Reading think NAFTA "Sounds like a laxative." (Nottage, 20)

The poor not only use all their lingo and slang that makes them seem dumb and unintelligent in their speech, but are also incapable of understanding or even properly saying the terminology and jargon of the upper-class, butchering and shortening the words despite not even knowing what they mean to begin with.

This divide between the poor's unprofessional language of their own combined with the poor's misunderstanding of the language of the rich highlights the lack of understanding between the two classes, the poor misunderstand and misconstrue the words of the rich, and the rich view the words of the poor as improper and unprofessional, and by extension, making the poor seem dumb and incompetent.

This divide presented by the book also reinforces both how the poor are unseen, and the core question of the book about empathy. It restates that the poor are unseen as the rich audience who have the money to watch plays or buy books will now be exposed to slang and lingo that they've probably never seen before in their life, showing how the poor are invisible in society because their colloquialisms are invisible and unheard of in society.The divide also reinforces the question asked by the play as by presenting the rich audience with words they've never heard before, it makes the rich audience start to ask the question of if they are actually empathetic, considering how little understanding they actually show for the poor in real life based on how little they understand the poor in this book.

However, the story is still missing one last device that truly showcases the lack of unity in society.

 

Due to the characters in Sweat being economically poor, they don't have very many possessions or valuables. They can only afford what keeps them alive another day, and so they have no materialistic possessions, only the bare necessary resources and materials like food and clothes. As such, there are very few objects to act in Sweat as symbols for larger concepts, yet the book still manages to contain many objects that serve as symbols for various ideas.

One of the big symbols in the book is the human body itself, as many characters in the book have either lost or injured part of their body. Stan almost "lost his entire leg" (Nottage, 21), the body part required to move and advance. He suddenly lost having his ability to literally move around the world taken away from him, but also his figurative ability to move and advance up the social ladder. When covering Gatsby, one of the pieces of evidence of the 1920's you could use was am image showing a man following the 10 steps, in the form of a staircase, to success. However, Stan losing his leg has suddenly up ended his potential to be that man and removed his chance of progressing up the economic statuses.

Tracey, due to her constant work at the plant, has consistent "back pain." (Nottage, 66) This is partly established to serve as a bit of irony as despite her back pain, Tracey has a spine, constantly willing to stick up for herself against her management and bosses, and even being too aggressive, as she's racist towards Oscar and Cynthia. However, this back pain of Tracey's is also introduced because it symbolizes how the poor are not able to stand up straight and fight for themselves, they're always hunched over and crouching in the face of the upper class.

There are many of these physical ailments for other characters in the book, like Brucie's drug addiction messing up his brain, symbolizing how the poor are uneducated and kept brainless to be more easily manipulated. Or how Cynthia's hands are constantly numb, and since hands are commonly a symbol for emotional connection as they are the part of the body used to reach out and connect with others, either through handshakes or high fives or fist bumps, Cynthia's hands being numb and unable to be felt is a symbol for how the poor lack the ability to emotionally connect or form meaningful friendships with others.

These various ailments and their symbols all still have one common connection, that being how they all symbolize the poor's constant struggles and pain, both physical, but also emotional or mental or figuratively.

And since all these symbols are tied to parts of the human body, which is something that every single one of us have, regardless of economic status or class, it all serves as one big symbol that symbolizes that despite us all having the same physical vessel that serves as our body, we are all still ironically divided and ununified. Despite the fact that we are all born with the same human body, we still fight amongst ourselves, either between our class or our race or our gender regardless of our common shared trait of being human.

There is a clear lack of empathy and understanding between us all despite how much we all share in common, as we choose to have conflict instead of empathy and understanding. This fact not only further feeds into the core question of how much empathy does the audience have, by making a symbol representing the lack of empathy and understanding between humans despite us all having the same human body, but also feeds into the idea that the poor are invisible in society. 

The poor are the ones who most commonly lose or injure parts of their body, and as such, they are the ones viewed as less human. Either because they have missing parts of their body that represent their humanity, and as such, have lost their humanity, or because they have injured the body that represents their humanity and as such, have injured and weakened their humanity. 

Either way, due to this loss of humanity, the poor are viewed as less than human. As a result, the poor are invisible or outcasts in human society because they're not human anymore, and as such, are not allowed or considered in society, which is why the poor are so invisible and unheard of in society, they literally are not viewed as part of it.

And because the poor do not understand that some do not consider them as part of human society, and the rich do not even want to acknowledge the poor to begin with, there will always remain a divide between the two classes. Due to this, there will always be a permanent lack of empathy, both in the story, and in real life.

And through Sweat highlighting and emphasizing this void of empathy in society, it makes the audience question themselves and their position in society. It makes the audience wonder if they're a part of this void? If they're part of the problem? If they're truly empathetic?