‘We Are A Country That Has Lost Our Narrative’: What Lynn Nottage Learned In Reading, Pa. When She Was Researching ‘Sweat’

“One of the first questions we asked was, how do you describe your city? People would respond by saying: ‘Reading was … ‘ They were incredibly nostalgic for this glorious imagined past. It nearly broke my heart. I thought this is a city that cannot conceive of itself in the present or future tense. It is a microcosm of what is happening in America today. We are a country that has lost our narrative. We can’t project our future because we don’t know where we are going.” — The Guardian