Sweat **** A

After acclaimed productions at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and Arena Stage, the timely new play by Pulitzer winner and MacArthur fellow Lynn Nottage (Ruined; By the Way, Meet Vera Stark; Intimate Apparel) has finally arrived at the Public Theater. It was worth the wait. The play might have been subtitled “Reasons To Hate NAFTA” or “How the Rust Belt Creates Trump Voters.” However, while corporate greed, globalization, racism and immigration policy all underlie the action, the play is not a sociopolitical screed. Nottage wisely keeps our attention on vividly drawn characters and on how forces beyond their control are refracted in their lives. Most of the action is set in 2000 at an after-work bar popular with employees of a metal tubing plant in Reading, PA. We meet three middle-age women — Cynthia (Michelle Wilson), Tracey (Johanna Day) and Jessie (Miriam Shor) — who have worked together on the plant floor for over 20 years. Cynthia’s son Chris (Khris Davis) and Tracey’s son Jason (Will Pullen), who also work at the plant, are best buddies. Cynthia’s estranged husband Brucie (John Earl Jelks) also frequents the bar. Stan the bartender (James Colby) used to work at the plant too until he was injured by a defective piece of equipment. Oscar (Carlo Alban), the bar’s Hispanic porter, might as well be invisible for all the attention he gets from customers. Cynthia is black, but her race has never been an issue until she is promoted to management over others. Her new position is hardly enviable when the plant owners decide to downsize. The play’s first and final scenes are set in 2008. As the play opens, parole officer Evan (Lance Coadie Williams) is conducting separate interviews with Jason and Chris, who have finished prison terms for a crime they committed eight years earlier. We flash back to 2000 to see the escalating events that led to the shocking crime and finally back to 2008 to see the consequences. It all makes for a gripping experience. The cast is uniformly excellent. John Lee Beatty’s revolving set is evocative, as are Jennifer Moeller’s costumes. Director Kate Whoriskey (Ruined) once again does Nottage full justice. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes including intermission.

War **

After enjoying all three plays I have seen by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins (Appropriate, An Octoroon and Gloria), I arrived at LCT3’s Claire Tow Theater with high expectations. Unfortunately I was disappointed. Although I credit the playwright for his ambition and imagination, I did not feel that he had produced a coherent work. From reviews, I gather that the play has changed considerably since its 2014 Yale Rep premiere, Nevertheless it still did not seem like a finished product. The focus is divided among too many themes including sibling rivalry, family secrets, the scourge of dementia, dealing with parental illness, meeting parental expectations, racism in America and Germany from WWII to the present and man’s underlying simian nature. Particularly in the second act, there are too many long monologues that interrupt the flow. Roberta (the able Charlayne Woodard) is a well-to-do middle-aged African-American divorcee who has been rushed to a Washington hospital after suffering a stroke while visiting the ape house at the zoo. Her daughter Joanne (Rachel Nicks), a would-be children’s writer, is married to Malcolm (Reggie Gowland), a low key school teacher of no particular distinction, who is white. They have a young daughter. Joanne has only recently resumed a relationship with her mother after long years of estrangement. Her hostile brother Tate (Chris Myers), a political functionary working in Boston, flies in to be at his mother’s bedside and immediately lashes out at everyone including the kindly nurse (Lance Coadie Williams). We later learn that Tate and his male partner have recently split. Roberta was brought to the hospital by a mysterious woman who speaks almost no English; this is Elfriede (Michelle Shay), a German half-sister that Roberta has only recently discovered and, somewhat implausibly, never mentioned to anyone. Malcolm discovers a man staying at Roberta’s apartment, Elfriede’s angry son Tobias (Austin Durant), who is out to get a share of his late grandfather’s legacy. The nonstop shouting and bickering between Tate and everyone else grows quickly tiresome; Tate is so relentlessly nasty that I eventually cringed whenever he opened his mouth. The play’s most interesting feature is that for much of the first act we witness the comatose Roberta trying to regain her bearings with the assistance of a pack of gorillas led by Alpha (Williams again) whose language is projected as subtitles. It did not work for me. Simian imagery pervades the play from the monkey-sound taunts at Roberta’s father in Germany to the ape house at the zoo and the apes in her struggle for consciousness. Mimi Lien’s elegant scenic design is evocatively lit by Matt Frey. Montana Blanco’s costumes are apt. I can’t fault director Lileana Blain-Cruz for failing to bring all the disparate elements together better. While this evening was a disappointment, three hits out of four is still an enviable record for a playwright. Running time: 2 hours, 10 minutes including intermission.

Shows for Days ***

Douglas Carter Beane’s comedic memoir, now in previews at Lincoln Center Theater’s Mitizi E. Newhouse Theater, recounts the events of the year the playwright turned 15 in a suburb of Reading, Pennsylvania and joined a local community theater where he discovered his place in the world and first experienced sex and unrequited love. His story is not particularly original or well-told and he panders shamelessly to an audience largely composed of gays and Jews.  The second act is a mess with plot developments that are downright implausible. However, if you forget about the plot and sit back to enjoy an almost nonstop series of hilarious one-liners, you will have a very good time. It helps tremendously that the young Beane, known here as Car, is played by the always-appealing Michael Urie (Buyer & Cellar) and that the theater’s artistic director Irene is the iconic Patti LuPone. We also meet Sid, the theater’s lesbian co-founder and manager (a wonderful Dale Soules); Clive, the company’s flamboyantly gay lead actor (a delightful Lance Coadie Williams); Damien, a handsome actor/waiter who is bisexual (Jordan Dean); and Maria, the young actress (Zoë Winters) whose role is notably underwritten. John Lee Beatty’s set combines an open stage with a back wall over-cluttered with props. The costumes by William Ivey Long are a good part of the fun. Jerry Zaks’s direction does not aim for subtlety.  The opportunity to see Urie, LuPone and a fine supporting cast keeping the zingers flying went a long way, at least for me, to overcome the play’s weaknesses. Running time: 2 hours 10 minutes including intermission.

Bootycandy **

This work by Robert O’Hara, now in previews at Playwrights Horizons, is a loose assemblage of sketches, most of them comedic, that don’t really fit together very well. The central character is Sutter (Phillip James Brannon) whom we see as an effeminate black child, a misunderstood teenager, a black playwright with a taste for racial vengeance, and a loving grandson. The scenes that include him have a loose narrative thread. Other scenes include a monologue by a preacher who comes out as a cross dresser and another by a man trying to talk himself out of a mugging. A clever costume trick is the gimmick of a hilarious scene depicting a phone conversation with two actors playing four characters. In a darker vein there is a long scene about two brothers-in-law who have a complex and painful relationship. The final scene of act one is an amusing faux conference at Playwrights Horizons with a panel comprised of the alleged authors of the previous sketches and a clueless white moderator. After intermission there is a funny yet moving scene of Sutter’s family at the dinner table. This is followed by an overlong sketch of two lesbians, Genitalia and Intifada, undoing their commitment ceremony. A friend accurately described it as a Saturday Night Live sketch that wears out its welcome. The evening turns very dark with a playlet about Sutter and a flaming butch queen friend picking up a drunk, emotionally unstable white man in a bar and going back to his hotel. In the aftermath, there is a Brechtian moment in which the actors rebel against the playwright and decide to skip the (nonexistent) prison scene. We end with Sutter reminiscing with his grandmother at her nursing home. The language is consistently and outrageously vulgar and there is both graphic description of sexual acts and extended male nudity (tellingly, by the only white actor). The best argument for the play is the opportunity it provides for five terrific actors to show their mettle. Jessica Frances Dukes, Jesse Pennington, Benja Kay Thomas and Lance Coadie Williams play multiple roles with great gusto. The revolving set and appropriately over-the-top costumes by Clint Ramos are first-rate. Once again I am persuaded that, in general, playwrights should not direct their own work. There are multiple instances where scenes run on much too long, a fault another director might well have corrected. I really hoped I could recommend it with more enthusiasm, but its many faults cancel out most of its strengths. I won't give away the meaning of the title. Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes including intermission.