On January 24th, students took an Arts Outta Town trip to see the Detroit Repertory Theatre’s production of Sweet Pea’s Mama. This play tells the story of Coralee, a maid for Abigail and her family. Among other things, Coralee cares for Abigail’s grown developmentally challenged son, whom she affectionately calls Sweet Pea. On the day of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination, tragedy occurs in Abigail’s home that has a devastating effect on everyone.
Playwright Robert Lawrence Nelson is a University of Michigan graduate,and he shared insight with Arts at Michigan about his experience writing this play:
What inspired you to write a play set around the assassination of Dr. King?
I was 13 in 1968, the year that Dr. King was assassinated. Around that age, you start to form an identity of yourself vis-à-vis your community at large, and you start to see yourself in a sociopolitical context. You start asking these questions, who am I? What am I about? What’s life about?
Secondly, I was born and raised in a little coal mining town, which is 30 miles from the town of the play. The town in the play is Pikeville, Kentucky, which is a real town. And I was born and raised about 30 miles from there in a little town on the border of West Virginia and Kentucky, a very provincial town. I’m not African American, but I am Jewish, and up until the age of 12, it was an idyllic upbringing in a small town. Around the age of 12, kids start to take on the prejudice of their parents, and I’m keenly aware of what it’s like to be on the short end of prejudice. Again, I’m not African American, and I don’t know that particular experience, but I do know prejudice and anger and hatred.
Also, the maid in the play has a very strong relationship with a developmentally challenged son of a White woman, so much so that he comes to depend on her more than his actual mother. When I first moved to LA, I did catering work. One time, the catering staff was in the kitchen of a very wealthy family, and there was a toddler in the kitchen. He fell down and hurt himself and started crying. The mother had come in, and she was all dressed up for the party. She reached for him to comfort him, and he turned away and reached for the nanny. The mother was mortified. She didn’t say anything, and that image has stuck in my head all these years later.
And the fourth reason is, I’m kind of reluctant to say, but it really was a strong motivation for me to write this when the book The Help came out. I was excited because the author covers the general tableau that I do, and I was disappointed because she had gotten there before I did, as a writer. However, when I read the book, I was very disappointed in it. What struck me was that the author had encapsulated four hundred years of prejudice in this country in this buffoon of a character. And the other end of this spectrum, the white woman and the maid, they were pure as the driven snow. They were virtuous. And in my view of prejudice, forgive the pun, it’s not black and white. It’s very shaded. And I think I’ve done that in this play. The narratives of the two women, there’s an expressed disdain and unexpressed love.
Which authors have inspired or influenced you?
I think I’ve been informed quite a bit by Philip Roth and Arthur Miller. Again I’m Jewish, and both of those guys are. They’re a generation ahead of me, but they both kind of eschew their Jewish heritage in the writing. Roth writes iconoclastic Jewish characters, which he’s received a lot of flak from the Jewish community about, and Miller doesn’t deal with it at all, and so in eschewing their heritage, they’ve kind of embraced it. I’ll give you an analogy. It’s like an atheist who is a vehement atheist has a stronger relationship with God than people who casually believe in God. So for whatever reason, partly because I’m Jewish, I’ve been attracted to both of those guys.
What does your writing process look like?
Typically, once I’ve finished a script, my mind just kind of goes thinking about new ideas. And when I think about new ideas, I just mentally bat them around in my head. I’ll typically juggle four or five ideas. The litmus test for me, I would say to myself, if that were a movie or a play, I would love to see that, but would I love to dedicate the next whatever amount of time, weeks, months, of my life to it? Typically, what I choose to write chooses me. When I latch onto an idea that’s an insatiable itch where I can’t put it down, I know oh yeah, that’s it.
So once I’ve chosen that, I don’t start writing for a long time. I typically just take notes, stream of consciousness notes, for days, weeks, probably no shorter than 6 weeks and no longer than about 12 weeks. I’ll have notepads by my bed, notepads in my car, in the kitchen, in the bathroom. When a thought comes up, I don’t censor it. I write it down. In the beginning of that process, my notes are very amorphous, and I’m kind of wondering myself, well, is there a story here? Where’s this going? Who are the characters?
And I’m asking myself all these questions, and as the days and weeks go by, the notes start to take on a shape by themselves, organically, where I start to see the arc of the story, the arc of the characters, the obstacles in the way of the characters. I start to see all these story elements. And at some point, and it differs with every project, I kind instinctively know when it’s time to stop taking notes and start writing, and then I start writing.
What were some of the challenges you had when writing this play?
I don’t remember any specific challenges about this play, per se, but what I can speak to is the challenges I have in writing any play. You have to tread a fine line. You don’t want to be too explicit, because if you’re too explicit, you don’t engage. The audience is not pulled in. If you hand feed them the play, they’re not engaged. There’s not the X factor.
So you want to make it opaque enough where they’re questioning, well what’s going on here? What are the real motivations? At the other end of the spectrum, if you make it too opaque or esoteric, you’ll lose your audience, where they’re disengaged.
So I think you have to tread a fine line between two polarities. And it’s tricky sometimes, no matter how conscious you are of it.
Note: Stay tuned for a follow-up interview where Robert Lawrence Nelson answers questions that students had after seeing this play.
