SWEAT - An Online Reading - July 30 & 31

By Lynn Nottage
Directed by Tracy Baxter.
July 30 &31, 2021 at 8PM
An Online Reading - Tickets

Actors Ensemble of Berkeley is proud to present an online workshop reading of SWEAT, by Pulitzer prize-winning playwright Lynn Nottage.

SWEAT is a blistering ensemble drama about identity, politics, lives and friendships devastated by the ongoing deindustrialization of working-class America. At times joyful, ecstatic, painful, and revelatory, this searing drama explores how lives and friendships are destroyed when a Steel Plant in the Rust Belt shuts down.

Tracy Baxter is a writer based in Oakland. Her script “KUDZU 2012” was a semifinalist selection in the 2018 Bay Area Playwright Foundations New Play Festival and a finalist selection in the 2020 Screencraft Stage Play contest. She's performed with Actors Ensemble of Berkeley, The Ninjaz of Drama, and Theater of Others. This is her first directorial effort.

Lynn Nottage was born in Brooklyn, New York. Her mother was a schoolteacher and her father was a child psychologist.  She wrote her first play, "The Darker Side of Verona", about an African-American Shakespeare Company, inspired by school productions.  She is a graduate of Brown University and has an MFA from Yale.  Some of her notable plays include "Intimate Apparrel", which follows a black seamstress in early 20th-century New York City, "Ruined", about women caught up in the 1990's civil war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and "Sweat".  She is the first woman of any race to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama twice, in 2009 for "Ruined" and 2017 for "Sweat".  More about Lynn Nottage can be found here: https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/nottage-lynn-1964/

SWEAT will be performed in a live online Zoom-style production twice, on July 30th and 31st, at 8 p.m.  Tickets will FREE (donation accepted), but you must get a ticket.

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CAST

Jason: Marcus Schenck

Tracy: Kathleen Bolton-Schmukler

Chris: Alfred J. Robinson IV

Cynthia: Shelley Doty

Oscar: Justin P. Lopez

Brucie/Evan:  Jourdán D. Olivier-Verdé

Stan: David Ghilardi

Jessie: Irina Dianova

 PRODUCTION

Director: Tracy Baxter

Stage Manager: Kaitlin Weinstein

Producers: Nathan Bogner and Jerome Solberg

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