Writing About Work

Course Description

Summary

At work, our character is revealed—our values, our vanities, our limitations and our longings. Perhaps that’s why so many American playwrights have chosen to write about our jobs as a way of writing about our souls.

In this class, we will read from the great canon of American plays about work, paired with journalism and memoirs about distinctive jobs: from slaughterhouse workers to long-haul truckers to professional poker players to Presidents. We will use this material to think both about work and about how to write about work. We will consider what our jobs reveal about us as individuals and as a society. We will look for insightful critiques of capitalism. We will consider the distinctive story possibilities that arise in workplace environments. We will think about which jobs fascinate us, and how we might use that fascination to make art that troubles the existing economic order and creates space for new possibilities. 

Plays may include Clifford Odets’ Waiting for Lefty, Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, Lynn Nottage’s Intimate Apparel, Dominique Morisseau’s Skeleton Crew, Philip Kan Gotanda’s Yankee Dawg You Die, Luis Valdez’s actos for El Teatro Campesino, David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross, Josefina López’s Real Women Have Curves, Annie Baker’s The Antipodes, and others. Non-fiction may include excerpts from Studs Terkel’s Working, Eyal Press’ Dirty Work, Viola Davis’ Finding Me, and others.

Assignments will include short scenes, original research and interviews in the tradition of Terkel’s oral histories, and a final play (or comparable creative project) inspired by a specific job or workplace environment. While this class is structured around plays, the questions we consider will be relevant to any creative person. All are welcome.