Broadway Direct: Lynn Nottage has been hard at work breaking glass ceilings. The Brooklyn, New York–born playwright recently shattered records as the first and only woman to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama twice, and this year she saw three new theater works run simultaneously on NYC stages.
3 comments:
I find interviews with Lynn Nottage to be so refreshing. She speaks truth that us creatives all understand and inherently empathize with. Ever since I read Sweat at my old school, I've always been fascinated with her as a playwright, and I think that the way she operates is telling simply through her interviews. It's frank, down to earth, and honest, and she says things that I think everybody attracted to her work has felt at one point. When she was asked how she felt about being the first woman to hold two Pulitzer prizes, I was right there with her when she asked "How am I the first? Someone should have had this honor before me."
Personally, I think Lynn Nottage's level of success is what we should aspire to. Never forgetting the human element of what makes our art tick, the stories that we relate to, not just virtue signaling for people, but real, raw stories of people in this world, and making it accessible to everyone. That level of outreach is why I got into theatre in the first place, and I hope to be able to continue that in the future.
Lynn Nottage is an amazing playwright and I'm so glad I was introduced to her through Foundations of Drama I. Her work largely revolves around the experiences of the working class in addition to the concept of race. She began working on her work, Sweat, by interviewing residents of Reading, Pennsylvania--which was at the time, one of the poorest cities in America. Sweat, in addition to her other works such as Ruined, both which won the Pulitzer Prize, are largely based on and inspired by conversations with real people who have been impacted by large-scale events--we are often desensitized to hearing tales of large-scale tragedies, but Nottage reminds us of the humanity and compassion necessary within crisis. There is something so touching about the intimacy which can be lifted from her work, a bit voyeuristic from the audience perhaps, but it results in an impactful resonance or even a dissonance with the content she has created.
Lynn Nottage is such an incredible artist, I read her play Ruined when I did pre college at CMU and we are currently reading another of her plays, Sweat, in FOundations of Drama. SHe has this incredible way of constructing engaging text often set in one location that is very simple and creating a completely engrossing and believable world to the point that I would believe if she said she sat a tape recorder down in a bar and just transcribed what it authentically heard, though of course her narratives are too well crafted to simply be transcriptions. One fascinating thing about this interview is how Nottage responds to the interviewer’s question about her being the only black woman to have won two Pulitzer prizes versus being the only person to have three new works running on broadway simultaneously. For one she says that she is proud to represent black women but wants more black women to be recognized as she has been and for the other she simply expresses that she is proud of her three works. I think people have tokenized her because of her pulitzer prizes so she is more comfortable to be the only person in the world with three new works on broadway this season, period, than she is to be the only black woman with two pulitzers because there are more black women who have earned two pulitzers but no one else in the world has done what she has this season on Broadway.
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