ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a case study of two contemporary, highly successful American plays, Lynn Nottage’s Sweat and Taylor Mac’s Hir, function in this manner. Each play explores identities lived at the intersection of race, class, gender, and sexuality; each play has moments in which disability is rendered visible in significant ways. In Sweat, Lynn Nottage creates quasi-documentary theater based on interviews she conducted in the poverty-stricken city of Reading, Pennsylvania. It was praised by critics, and Charles Isherwood noted that complex matters of race, class and culture are handled with impeccable deftness,” as it reveals how racial prejudice fragments a community bound by privation in an age of globalization. In the case of Hir, transgender identity becomes a model for wildly imagining beyond the patriarchy that has oppressed women, and queer and transgender people.
