LA Daily News - Recommended
"...The pacing is clean, seamless and keeps the tension building as it should, even as it makes room for the necessary and very human moments of humor which make these people real. Emilio Sosa's costumes absolutely define character differences, sending messages in visual shorthand."
Broadway World - Recommended
"...As the year 2000 plays out, each ensuring date displayed via the multimedia projection design by Yee Eun Nam takes us further into the worldwide financial and political problems that took place at the turn of the millennium. Rumors fly that someone from the line is being considered for management, which turns out to be Cynthia, much to Tracey's disappointment believing she would have been the more qualified for the promotion. It is her belief that it is just because Cynthia is black that she got the job, management's attempt to "put on a good face" by bringing a minority into their ranks."
Stage and Cinema - Somewhat Recommended
"...That Nottage is a brilliant writer is inarguable. Her By the Way, Meet Vera Stark is one of my favorite modern plays. Intimate Apparel is practically a classic by now. So, I am especially surprised, shocked even, that I am not altogether enthusiastic about Sweat, a play that has been greeted with almost universal acclaim. It feels too often like a sociological constructed laboratory experiment of even-keeled fairness. Each of the nine characters gets an origin monologue, each gets to reveal secret hopes and fears, and violence plays out with a kind of dull inevitability. Scenes that should be riveting are oddly perfunctory. The play tries not to preach while preaching to the choir.'
Stage Scene LA - Highly Recommended
"...Playwright Lynn Nottage gives voice to blue-collar America in her Pulitzer Prize-winning Sweat, now making a gut-punching Los Angeles debut at the Mark Taper Forum, a suspenseful, insightful look at an electorate so disillusioned by their failed American Dreams that they ended up doing the unthinkable."
Total Theater - Recommended
"...What shines through, though, is Nottage's fiery dialogue, the superb acting of the ensemble cast, and Lisa Peterson's incisive direction. Yee Eun Nam's kaleidoscopic projection design also gives the play a vivid backdrop."
Cultural Weekly - Recommended
"...Despite that factor and the play's length and slight tendency to preach, the production rarely drags. Its characters are human. Its closing moment could be stronger, but by then the tale has been told and its argument reverberates keenly in a society that has yet to come to grips with its issues, its anti-immigrant rage, opioid devastation and gun fatalities. Nottage doesn't do the work for us, but she does give out very clear instructions on connecting the dots."
KCRW - Somewhat Recommended
"...This is a play, like the dive bar at its center, where authenticity is paramount. The script demands the kind of lived pathos and experience that you can't get mostly right. It's not that there's anything terribly off about the production but the cast never really feels like a unit. Dialogue that should have the ease and speed of old friends arguing has the stilted pacing of actors trying not to step on one another's lines."
Stage Raw - Highly Recommended
"...Director Lisa Peterson skillfully allows the moments of lighthearted banter between those characters to breathe while ramping up the intensity of their interactions at critical points in the story. All the while she brings a dynamism to the staging, so that scenes where people sit around in a bar talking never feel static."
Peoples World - Highly Recommended
"...This is not "feel-good" theatre, but it is down-and-out real, sinewy, rough and true. It shouldn't be missed."
On Stage Blog - Recommended
"...SWEAT is a little too long in some scenes, and I did notice a few audience members leave. However, they missed out on seeing one of the most powerful scenes with a surprising twist. I'm glad I stayed to watch the handsome and likable Oscar rise up and succeed in achieving a happier outcome than the rest."
