Sweat

Use these essay questions as writing and critical thinking exercises for all levels of writers, and to build their literary analysis skills by requiring textual references throughout the essay.

Differentiation Suggestion: For English learners or struggling writers, strategies that work well include graphic organizers, sentence frames or starters, group work, or oral responses.

Scaffolded Essay Questions

Student Prompt: Write a short (1-3 paragraph) response using one of the below bulleted outlines. Cite details from the text over the course of your response that serve as examples and support.

1. Lynn Nottage chose Reading, Pennsylvania, as the setting for her play because the town experienced deep poverty after the closure of industries impacted the town’s work force. The characters in the play are presented realistically, based on Nottage’s interviews with real people. With both flaws and virtues, each character is a product of their environment. Choose one character to analyze. 

• How would you describe the character you chose as a product of their environment within the world of the play? (topic sentence)
• In the body of the essay, choose at least three examples of evidence in the play to support your statement about the character. How does this evidence demonstrate that the character is a product of their environment?
• Draw a conclusion about how you think the character could potentially break free of their environment. What are their positive traits and unexplored talents? What kind of life do you think they could have had, and what would they have needed to get there? What do you think, based on the circumstances of the play, the character will do with the rest of their life?

2. Olstead, the factory, functions almost like a manifestation of the faceless people who run it from the offices, an offstage character that has significant power over every other character in the play. Aside from Cynthia’s brief promotion, all the onstage characters are at a similar level of economic disadvantage that is created by Olstead and other local factories that similarly dominate local livelihoods. Yet the conflicts in the play that arise from the stress caused by the factory are deeply interpersonal, with characters often scapegoating each other despite mutual victimization from Olstead’s choices to exploit NAFTA and replace long-time employees with cheaper labor in Mexico.

• How do the interpersonal conflicts and fights function in the play as an extension of Olstead as an offstage character? (topic sentence)
• Choose at least three conflicts in the play to explore in the body of your essay and explain how each one supports your topic sentence. How is the conflict related to the factory? How does the factory benefit (or not) from this conflict?
• Draw a conclusion about how the conflicts undermine the characters’ protesting and picketing. Do you think that these conflicts made a difference in the ultimate outcome of Olstead’s actions? Could their issues of employment and livelihood have ended differently?

3. Almost all the characters deal with some level of substance use or abuse, including the use and abuse of alcohol that occurs because the play is set in a bar. Consider how and why different characters fall into substance addiction and abuse, and how it affects their lives and identities.

• How does substance abuse function in the play, and what does it signify? (topic sentence)
• In the body of the essay, choose three different characters who are significantly affected by substance abuse and addiction. How did they get there? What parts of their lives and identities are lost to addiction, and how do they express these losses through nostalgia?
• Draw a conclusion as to how substance abuse works for or against the objectives of the factories—like Olstead—in their plans to force workers to either leave or accept drastically reduced wages and benefits.

Full Essay Assignments

Student Prompt: Write a structured and well-developed essay. Include a thesis statement, at least three main points supported by textual details, and a conclusion.

1. The structure of Sweat follows two timelines, one in 2000 and one in 2008. Nottage strategically reveals bits of information about the circumstances and actions that brought about the changes in the characters’ lives eight years later. Most notably, the climax of the play finally reveals why Jason and Chris went to prison. Examine the way Nottage develops Jason and Chris before revealing their crime, and give at least three examples of moments before the climax that shape how the audience views them. How do these moments color the way the audience views the attack on Oscar and the accidental assault on Stan? How does the last scene of the play add to or change that coloring?

2. James Truslow Adams coined the term “American Dream” in 1931, defining it as “a dream of a social order in which each man and woman shall be able to obtain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized for others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.” What does the American Dream mean to the characters in the play? Choose three characters and describe their relationship to the American Dream. Consider their actual circumstances in the play’s two time periods, their nostalgic recollections of earlier days in Reading’s industrialization, and their fantasies about a better future. Who keeps reaching, and whose dreams are destroyed? What is Nottage saying about the American Dream through these characters?

3. At the beginning of the play, the first image that the audience sees is a young white man with white supremacist tattoos on his face. The visceral reaction that Evan describes—wanting to punch Jason in the face—mimics the reaction that many people have toward stereotypical expressions of racism. But race and expressions of racism and xenophobia are much more complex in the play than swastika face tattoos. How does racial difference function in the everyday lives of the characters? Who is accepted and who is “othered”? Why? Choose a character who either expresses or experiences racism or xenophobia in the play, and describe three instances in which racism or xenophobia is either blatant or expressed through microaggression. Explain how the offending character justifies their racism/xenophobia, either directly or tacitly. What do you think Nottage is saying about how casual racism functions in working-class communities? How is Jason’s initial impression of white supremacy complicated and/or affirmed in the course of the play?