Wichita Rep stages Lynn Nottage’s Sweat at Oliver Place

Lynn Nottage’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play “Sweat” takes place in a bar in the blue-collar area of Reading, Pa.

And Wichita Repertory Theatre artistic director Julie Longhofer wanted to get as authentic as possible.

“We built a box set for this little bar, and we’ve been partnering with some local people to equip it like a bar,” she said of the play, which opens next week at Oliver Place, a former church. “In the play, they drink a lot of beer. And our actors will be drinking from a real keg of non-alcoholic beer, which (is) actually is kind of fun. We tested the beer the other night and it was funny, because all of the actors were partying and talking and laughing, and someone said, “is there any alcohol in this beer?’”

Nottage, Longhofer said, intentionally made the setting a rundown watering hole.

“People often tend to speak the truth in bars,” Longhofer said. “There’s just a natural lubricant there of people and alcohol and speaking the truth.”

“Sweat” is an ensemble piece that checks in with its 10 characters over 15 scenes, most of them in the year 2000 – what Nottage called the “de-industrial revolution.”

“Things changed so much in the Rust Belt. People whose families had worked to build things for three generations suddenly weren’t needed anymore, and a lot of jobs went overseas,” Longhofer said. “There was kind of a ripple effect of changes for families, and so the play is very much about working-class protagonists of many different races, different backgrounds, but they’re connected by this.”

Longhofer said she liked the storytelling aspect of checking in for a month at a time over a year.

“Anyone who’s ever been through that moment when you wake up and you say, ‘How did we get here?’ You know, when did all of this start? When did my life start changing?” she said. “That’s kind of what the play is about, and specifically for these working-class protagonists who are just brilliantly human and very, very interesting.”

“Sweat,” Longhofer said, has been called a “study in empathy.”

“I found it so educational to just kind of watch these people’s lives, and the things that frustrated them, and the things they had to overcome. And it really opened a window on a way of life that I don’t think I understood very well,” she said. “You know how some plays can be didactic and preach at you — this isn’t one of those plays.

“Ultimately, it just shows you that you don’t understand another person’s choices until you walk a whole mile in their shoes, and it lets you do that,” she said. “So, it’s got a tremendous amount of vibrant life in it, with a lot of heartfelt joy and comedy, but ultimately, it’s a drama which has a really big impact at the end.”

For actress Kate Compton, it’s the second time for her to play Tracey, one of the factory workers, after playing the same part while a graduate student at Northwestern University.

“It’s so different than what I did the last time,” said Compton, who began last fall as an assistant professor of performing arts at Wichita State. “I’m really enjoying the newfound discoveries that I’m finding a second time around in this very complicated character.”

Actress Jeneé Jenkins Saffold, in contrast, had not heard of the play until Longhofer handed her the script and told her to consider the character of Cynthia, another factory worker and a close friend of Compton’s Tracey.

“I was blown away,” said Saffold, a Wichita attorney. “I thought it was a really powerful show, and I was like, this would be really cool to see this done in Wichita.”

Compton said she hopes the audience drinks in the message of a play set in a bar.

“What I hope people leave the show with is a deeper understanding of how complicated our world is, how connected we are, and how every choice you make is connected to somebody else. It has power — and that they’re not always two sides to every issue. There are in this play, 10 sides to this issue that they’re looking at, right?

“Just to have that deeper understanding that we are all living in a complicated mess of a world, and we all affect each other, and to have a little more compassion for each other,” she said.