In a town such as Reading, Pennsylvania, factories are a lifeline. They loom over the town like a spectre. The unionized workers take their jobs seriously and are grateful for them. But when a strike approaches, things are liable to change. Having created this landscape, Lynn Nottage’s characters grapple with their futures in her Pulitzer Prize-winning Sweat, which is being produced by SUNY Brockport’s Department of Theatre and Music Studies. The play opens on Friday, April 21, at 7:30 p.m. at the Tower Fine Arts Center, 180 Holley Street, Brockport. Tickets are $17/general, $12/senior citizens, Brockport alumni, faculty, and staff, and $9/students. They are available at https://www.fineartstix.brockport.edu, at the Tower Box Office, or by phone at 585-395-2787.
The production is being directed by Sofia Ubilla, who comes to Brockport by way of the department’s alliance with Geva Theatre Center. Through this decades-long relationship, Geva provides a directing fellow to the Brockport campus for one production each year. Ubilla’s professional experience is quite varied for someone at this stage of their career and includes productions at Fordham University, INTAR, Geva, and Syracuse Stage.
With a factory strike becoming imminent, Ubilla feels that though the play appears to pit men vs. women, Black vs. white, or even strikers vs. scabs, “I think it’s a mischaracterization to define the play as being about conflict between the characters rather than the characters fighting for their right to life and community against a world that wants to tear them apart… they are faced with an existential, world-shattering crisis that is completely beyond their control. None of them have any power to stop what is happening to them, and the play is about how they all cope with this in very different and mostly harmful ways. All of them are deeply flawed, but it is of vital importance to me to have extreme empathy for everyone on that stage.”
Staging a show that has a Pulitzer Prize in its pedigree might have been a concern for a still-novice director who is still learning the ropes. Ubilla counters that “the fact that it’s a Pulitzer Prize winner actually makes the work much easier. The play is the play. It knows what it is, and tells such an incredibly rich story that is all on the page. I come from a world of new play development, where a lot of the rehearsal process is about asking really big questions about the story and the characters. With a play like Sweat… the answers to a lot of these big questions are already there.”
This is not Ubilla’s first time visiting the Rochester region. She related that “one of the most impactful projects” she has worked on was being “an associate director for Somewhere Over the Border at Geva Theatre. The show was a musical that told the story of the playwright’s mother’s journey of crossing the border from El Salvador to the U.S. but told through the lens of The Wizard of Oz. This show made me fall in love with musical theatre because, for the first time, I saw myself in one of those stories… The experience cemented in me the power of representation… It is an incredibly healing experience to work on something like that.”
About her latest Rochester experience, Ubilla is “filled with gratitude to be here with these students having so much fun working on telling this story. I can’t wait to share it with the community!”
Performances of Sweat are on April 21, 22, 27, 28, and 29, at 7:30 p.m. There is also a matinee on Sunday, April 23, at 2 p.m.
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