The Harsh Reality

In the many years that I have been alive, I have read my fair share of non-fiction – from stories that brought forth tears of sympathy to those that have made me clench my fists and grind my teeth in frustration. Yet, I have been stunned to silence by Lynn Nottage’s play “Sweat”. It seems The New Yorker’s description of Nottage as having “built a career on making invisible people visible” is a rather accurate statement, and she displays her ideas post prominently in her play “Sweat”. As background for those who have never read it, “Sweat” follows the lives of ordinary people and their struggles as they experience a variety of modern-day problems, including unemployment, drug abuse, and violence against each other. The very first thing to notice is that Nottage’s people of focus are all those who are ordinary. Each person is struggling in their own way: Brucie and his drug addiction, Cynthia and Chris looking to gain a better future, and the others, who find themselves stuck in the past

 I think, now, more than ever, reality sucks. Everything seems really hard. Ever since COVID, things have begun changing, and not for the better. I want to look at this in a different way, however. It seems that we have all also grown from the experiences that we have been through in the past few years. I think, somewhere along these lines at least, was what Langston Hughes was trying to convey through his poem ‘Mother to Son’. Hughes utilizes the phrase “crystal stair” to add some emphasis towards how life, for some people, is a simple climb. They walk up the stairs and reach whatever goal they are attempting to. On the other hand, Hughes emphasizes how the narrator’s own staircase “had tacks in it, and splinters, and boards torn up” to offer the perspective of someone who hasn’t had it as easy. The narrator has been through many hardships throughout her life, which is displayed by how worn down her staircase is. Yet, when she speaks to her son, she mentions that she has “been climbin