Sweat by Lynn Nottage

Timely play about a the plight of the factory worker in middle America in the early 200s. Couldn't be more relevant right now, but I will put that aside in this post. More interested in talking about what I learned from this play re: dramatic writing itself. 

Biggest lesson...

When characters have history together everything is heavier, more realistic and more meaningful. Those memories (good and bad) and resentments and jealousies that build over time inform every interaction we have with each other in real life, so they should be behind everything your characters do in writing too.

This is a lesson that great plays keep on teaching us. We have applied it to some of our recent writing well, but we should always strive to do better.

This is a great play, and a lot of that is because every character's perspective is so carefully considered. You can feel the writer empathizing with each of them, writing from inside each of them. That's awesome.

Beyond that, this is another example of looking at one issue from lots of different perspectives. Parents, children, black people, white people, immigrants, old people, young people...

All of that is another way that history does a great job of informing the scenes here. It's not only the history of what the characters have experienced with each other, it's also their shared history with their hometown, with their jobs and with their neighbors.

In lots of ways this is a play about nostalgia. My favorite line says "Nostalgia is a disease," and that's one of the big thematic ideas here. Which brings me to another point...

This play, again like lots of the great stuff we read, explored big ideas. The writer clearly had so many opinions on this idea of nostalgia, and how it can hurt us (plus big ideas on America and what it was and what it's becoming).

She argued every side of these themes in every little thing she did, and that is what was interesting about his piece.

It might as well have been a thesis about the state of American manufacturing and its impact on the people who work in that industry, it was that detailed and well thought out.

But thank God it wasn't a thesis, because exploring how every character suffered alongside America brought so much humanity to this play. 

Every character was HUMAN, and that's what characters need to be. It's so dumb to think that the people you write have to be LIKABLE.

Likable is just another word for HUMAN. If they're HUMAN, that's far and away all you need.

I know a lot of this stuff is information we already know, but it's always good to reinforce it and remind ourselves that great writing consistently exhibits these traits.