In August of 1970, after being released from the U. S. Navy, I drove cross-country from San Diego to Washington, D.C. The nearly month long trek included visits with family members I hadn’t seen for several years while serving overseas, yet my most memorable encounter is the mechanized family that pulled into the parking area at Jenny Lake in Grand Teton National Park. I’d read about John Steinbeck’s pick-up camper in “Travels With Charley” but they were still relatively rare. Therefore, when the huge GMC pick-up truck rolled to a stop it dumbfounded me, adorned with a motorcycle racked on the front bumper, a fishing boat lashed upside down on the top of its camper shell and towing a small Jeep. Three children and a spouse spilled out of the camper as the driver jumped down on the asphalt.

The owner of this recreational extravaganza was an assembly line worker at a General Motors plant in the Midwest. He had assembled his American made traveling fleet with discounts available for union members from the United Auto Workers. None of this seemed particularly exceptional at the time. Manufacturing jobs were known to pay well and middle class families launched off annually on ambitious vacations. This family was headed west for Disneyland. Neither of us recognized we were surfing the crest of an economy about to begin shrinking incomes for most working Americans. Truth be told, I was a bit envious.

All of this came to mind as I watched Lynn Nottage’s Pulitzer Prize winning play, SWEAT, at the Denver Center this past weekend. Nottage has picked up where African American playwright August Wilson left off with his cycle of dramas set in the black neighborhoods of Pittsburgh during each decade of the 20th Century. Her 2017 Broadway hit has only become available to regional theaters during the past year and is receiving rave reviews everywhere it is staged. This is Nottage’s second Pulitzer following her 2010 prizewinner, Ruined, which now equals Wilson’s pair of Pulitzers. SWEAT offers a nearly stroboscopic series of brief scenes exploring the lives and relationships among a group of manufacturing workers in Reading, Pennsylvania. This group of friends is seen in both 2000 and 2008, hopscotching back and forth as their plant closes and their lives fray in the bar at Mike’s Tavern.

In two and a half swift hours the audience learns more about the collapse of living standards and the ensuing desperation of Americans whose lives have been turned upside down by globalization than might be gained from perusing the recent books featuring profiles of Trump voters. Drama often struggles to discuss political issues without preaching, but Nottage avoids this trap. While racism, despair, even opioids edge onto her stage, they arrive as the natural and understandable consequences of lives slipping into chaos and poverty. These are men and women who are being victimized by forces and distant managers over whom they not only have no control, but little contact. Even the worker promoted into management and then assigned to lock out her comrades can offer them no solace. Neither can their union.

Caught in a whirlpool of economic disintegration each worker becomes ever more isolated and self-destructive as they grasp for personal survival. Even the newly minted manager is performing janitorial work by 2008, discarded in favor of the factory’s transfer to Tijuana. Their anger elicits violence and existential fear undermines their previous decency as no life rafts appear. Nottage’s cast is not predominantly African American, but her story examines the genuine affection that can be built across the barriers of race. Alas, she finds those alliances can prove fragile when the door to a future that felt so predictable slams shut.

Looking back across the past half century, it’s easy to criticize our political leaders for being asleep at the wheel while the American Dream withered. But that complaint employs the bias of 20/20 hindsight. It was difficult to grasp that the American cornucopia was running out of dynamism in the 20th century. By many measures American productivity has actually continued to grow at a healthy pace. We simply stopped distributing the profits from a changing economy equitably. The Colorado legislature funded job training for coal miners this year. That’s a worthy cause, but it represents small potatoes. It seems like time for some anticipatory democracy. What about the truck drivers who will be replaced by autonomous vehicles during the next decade? Lyft and Uber are spending research dollars figuring out how to replace their drivers. Artificial intelligence and robotics will extinguish even more jobs. We can continue to look away – pretending job loss is the fault of its victims. Or not.

Nottage demonstrates that art can be more compelling and more persuasive than fact. SWEAT runs for three more weeks. Catch it.

Miller Hudson is a public affairs consultant and a former state legislator. He can be reached at mnhwriter@msn.com.