A half dozen actors run through a scene in one of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s rehearsal rooms. The setting is a bar in Reading, Pennsylvania, after the financial crises. A group of steelworkers are talking about the factory that locked them out.

“This is the first time I’ve been out of my apartment in a week,” reads actor Terri McMahon. “Do you know what it’s like to get up and have no place to go? I am a worker. I’ve worked since I could count money. That’s me!”

And writing plays about work, and how our work defines who we are, is very much in tune with Lynn Nottage, who has won just about every honor a playwright can win: Pulitzer, Macarthur, Guggenheim awards. There’s the seamstress in her best known work, “Intimate Apparel,” who expresses herself through fabric. There’s the high-powered African American publicist in “Fabulation,” who loses her money and must return to her working-class roots. And there are the Congolese women in Nottage’s Pulitzer-winning play, “Ruined,” who have survived horrendous war crimes, only to have to make their living in a brothel.

And “Sweat,” which opens on August 2 and runs through October 31, explores America’s de-industrialization, asking what happens when the jobs we measure ourselves and our community by disappear.

“With this play, I think Lynn is following in the footsteps of Arthur Miller's ‘The Death of a Salesman’ or (Clifford) Odet's ‘Paradise Lost,’” says the play’s director, Kate Whoriskey, who has worked with Nottage on several plays over the past 15 years. “She's really exploring the new economic paradigm and how it affects ourselves as individuals and the community.”