Recent play reading - The Newly Married Couple

I've re-upped my commitment to read more plays with a variety of perspectives, ideas, styles, etc. as part of my effort to improve my own wrighting.

"The Newly Married Couple," by Bjornstjerne Bjornson

I was browsing the library shelves for plays, and spotted a book of three comedies by Bjornstjerne Bjornson.  Who could resist, right?  I read the first play in the book, his two-act comedy "The Newly Married Couple," from 1865.  There were some interesting elements in it that I enjoyed.  The first act takes place in the home of the young woman's parents.  They are very wealthy, and have lavish surroundings.  The second act takes place in the newly married couple's home, but it's played on essentially the same set - the husband has worked tirelessly to recreate his bride's surroundings, to help her feel more comfortable there.  The conflict came down to the new bride not being ready to leave her parents.  There isn't an indication of her age, but she's referred to as a child quite often, and apparently it took some convincing for the groom to convince her parents that it would be fine.  The girl marries him out of a kind of romantic misunderstanding of what she was getting herself into.

Kind of creepy, honestly.  The young lady has a servant.  The groom basically charmed the servant so that she would say nice things about him in the young lady's presence - part of his marriage proposal plan.  So the servant falls in love with him.

In the second act, the servant has written a novel and had it published.  The novel basically reflects the newly married couple's relationship, but ends in tragedy when the groom falls in love with the servant and the young bride realizes too late that she loved him all along.  The servant reads it to the young woman, but doesn't reveal that she's the author. 

In the end, the young bride does realize her love for her husband, and they proceed toward matrimonial happiness, while the girl's parents head off for Italy, taking the servant with them.  Her parting line is that her next book will be a better one, something none of the other characters understand, since they didn't know she was the author.  It's a nice tragicomic ending, though - she tried to influence the relationship toward something she could capitalize on, but only succeeded in bringing them closer together and alienating herself.  However, now she gets to travel to Italy, so that's something.

As a wrighter, my takeaways from this play was that the characters each had pretty clear motivations, and were working toward their goals throughout the play.  I thought the characters were pretty shallow and 2-dimensional, so their motivations weren't that interesting.  However, even when a character has a motivation that is pretty banal like "I want that guy to fall in love with me," it's hard not to get a little invested in finding out what happens.  So I think that if I can create characters with strong, clear motivations, even well-trod ones, it will be intriguing to my readers/viewers.