Lynn Nottage

• Born: November 2, 1964
• Place of Birth: Brooklyn, New York

Biography

Lynn Nottage was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. Her parents instilled in her an interest in social justice activism and an awareness of their African American heritage. Both Nottage’s mother and grandmother visited Africa on several occasions, and their spiritual link with their homeland represented an important touchstone in Nottage’s creative imagination from an early age.

Nottage commuted to Harlem to attend the High School of Music and Art. She subsequently attended Brown University, where she originally intended to prepare herself for a career in journalism. At Brown, however, she discovered an affinity for playwriting.

Upon completing her bachelor’s degree in 1986, Nottage attended the Yale School of Drama. Eager to experience a break from the academic world, she went to work for the national press office of Amnesty International after receiving her master’s degree in 1989. During the four years she spent working for that organization, she rekindled her long-standing interest in human rights activism. She also nurtured a fascination with African culture and politics that would later find expression in her dramatic works. Her first short play, Poof! (1993), was inspired by her determination to bring attention to the issue of domestic abuse.

In addition to writing plays, Nottage is also a screenwriter. In 2003, she cofounded a production company, Market Road Films, with her husband. She has also created original projects for television entities, including HBO, Showtime, Harpo, and National Geographic. Its films Full Battle Rattle and The Notorious Mr. Bout premiered at the 2008 Berlinale and 2014 Sundance Film Festival, respectively. She returned to the academic world in 2001, joining the faculty of the Yale School of Drama, and in 2014 she became an associate professor in the theater department at the Columbia University School of the Arts.

Creative Life

Nottage’s love for drama arose early in life. She inherited a fascination with storytelling from her grandmother. Every day after school, she would listen to the stories told by her grandmother, mother, and other neighborhood women gathered at her family’s kitchen table. This inspired her to start writing mini-plays.

Although Nottage wrote her first play at the age of eight, she did not fully embrace an identity as a playwright until her late twenties, even after she had completed a degree at the Yale School of Drama. She has attributed this slow evolution to an impression that playwriting was the professional province of men and to a paucity of African American women role models.

Nottage penned her first staged play, a short work entitled Poof!, while she was still working at Amnesty International. Written in a single sitting after she had viewed photographs of women arriving at a battered women’s shelter, it made its world premiere at an independent theater in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1993. Poof! won the Heideman Award and placed Nottage on the radar of theater critics across the country.

In 1994, Nottage won a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, enabling her to focus on creating full-length plays. Por’knockers made its premiere in 1995, followed by Crumbs from the Table of Joy, which New York City’s Second Stage Theatre produced in 1995, and then Mud, River, Stone in 1996.

During a hiatus in which she married and gave birth to her daughter, Nottage developed a fascination with her personal ancestry, sparked by both her mother’s passing and her own entry into motherhood. During this period, she conducted meticulous background research for her next plays, Las Meninas (2002) and Intimate Apparel (2003). She wrote Fabulation; or, The Re-education of Undine, which premiered in 2004, simultaneously with Intimate Apparel, to which it serves as a companion play.

Ruined (2008), which won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, evolved from Nottage being haunted by stories she found buried in the back pages of newspapers detailing the plight of rape survivors among civil war refugees in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). By the Way, Meet Vera Stark (2011) was inspired by Nottage’s viewing the 1933 film Baby Face, starring Barbara Stanwyck; the relationship between Stanwyck’s character and an African American maid, portrayed by Theresa Harris, sparked Nottage’s curiosity about Harris’s journey to Hollywood and the paths of other African American actors from that era. Similarly, Nottage became increasingly preoccupied with the effects of the economic downturn of the late 2000s; she was motivated to visit Reading, Pennsylvania, after reading a 2011 New York Times article designating it the poorest city in America, and the experience led her to write Sweat (2015), which went on to enjoy a run on Broadway in 2016.

Nottage's well-received antipoaching drama, Mlima's Tale, made its Off-Broadway debut at the Public Theater in 2018. It went on to be nominated for Lortel and Outer Critics Circle Awards. Nottage collaborated with Miranda Haymon on the Off-Broadway drama The Watering Hole in 2022. The work filled three stages, the lobby, and some backstage spaces with water-theme multimedia installations.

Nottage has won numerous awards for her work, including the 2004 PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater Award, the 2004 and 2009 New York Drama Critics’ Circle Awards for Best Play (for Intimate Apparel and Ruined), the 2005 Obie Award for Playwriting, a 2005 Guggenheim Fellowship, the 2009 Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Play, the 2010 Steinberg Distinguished Playwright Award, the inaugural Horton Foote Prize in 2010, the 2010 Lee Reynolds Award, a 2011 Lilly Award, and the 2012 Helen Hayes Award for Outstanding Resident Play. In 2007, she received a MacArthur Fellowship, and she was presented the 2016 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize and the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for Sweat, making her the first person to win two Pulitzer Prizes for drama. In 2018 Nottage was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The following year, Fabulation received the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Revival of a Play. In 2019, she received the MacArthur Genius Fellowship, and in 2022, she received the Distinguished Achievement in the American Theater Award.

In addition to her own plays, Nottage has collaborated on musical theater productions. She wrote the book for the musical adaptation of the Sue Monk Kidd novel The Secret Life of Bees, the libretto for the Intimate Apparel opera, and another libretto for MJ: A Broadway Musical, about the late singer Michael Jackson.

Public and Private Life

Nottage is married to filmmaker Tony Gerber. In addition to their daughter, they have a son adopted from Ethiopia.

Major Works

Nottage’s plays take place in an eclectic array of settings, including Brooklyn in the heyday of the Cold War, a contemporary rural Mozambique hamlet, and the eighteenth-century court of the French aristocracy. Despite being rooted in disparate places and eras, these works explore common themes of survival in the aftermath of personal and political trauma, as well as survival in the context of work, romantic relationships, contemporary politics, and family dynamics. Informed by Nottage’s lifelong passion for social activism, her plays seek to cast injustice in sharp relief and to rouse empathy and action; they ask audiences to confront unsettling issues in both history and the present day from provocative perspectives.

In many cases, Nottage’s protagonists have no choice but to compromise their integrity in the interest of self-preservation. Marginalization and the struggle to define an identity represent two other key themes her characters struggle to navigate. Thrust together by circumstances, they form unlikely connections, founded in mutual vulnerability, that defy social conventions governing the interplay of race, power, and sexuality.

Many of these characters also come from backgrounds that have either remained largely invisible in the American theater canon or been sidelined with less-than-complex representations. Nottage tells the stories of the voiceless, including the young victims of Congolese war atrocities, domestic violence survivors, maids, seamstresses, and unemployed factory workers.

Poof! is Nottage’s darkly comic take on the topic of domestic abuse. Writing the play in a burst of frustration at the anguish of abuse survivors, she envisioned a world in which power is magically shifted and abusers fall victim to their own fury. Poof!’s protagonist, Loureen, struggles to explain to her neighbor and best friend, Florence, how her husband spontaneously combusted before her eyes. Loureen is simultaneously horrified and thrilled by what she assumes is a newly discovered witchy power of language: "All this time I didn’t know why he was so afraid for me to say anything, to speak up. Poof!" Although she refuses to grant Florence’s request to try to dispatch Florence’s own husband in a similar manner, Loureen ultimately decides to build a new life literally out of the ashes, which she and Florence neatly sweep under the carpet.

Like Poof!,Por’knockers uses a backdrop of violence—in this case, terrorism—to examine themes of power, resistance, guilt, and redemption. In 1995 New York, a group of smartly dressed young African American revolutionaries celebrate their bombing of an FBI building, an act they have deliberately carried out on a federal holiday both to give symbolic value and to avoid human casualties. Their triumph turns to distress when they learn that some children had broken into the building to play and died in the explosion. Although they attempt to convince themselves that they did not intend the tragedy and are therefore not responsible for the deaths, they succumb to guilt and remorse. As their fervor dissipates and they slowly come to accept the human toll of their actions, the bombers elicit the sympathy of the audience, who glimpse their humanity much as the bombers themselves must grapple with knowledge of their victims’.

WithCrumbs from the Table of Joy, Nottage shifted away from themes of violence and conscience to a comic, melodramatic exploration of the intersection of race, politics, and family. Set in 1950s Brooklyn, the play chronicles the coming-of-age of its seventeen-year-old African American protagonist, Ernestine Crump, as she navigates the loss of her mother and her grief-stricken father’s subsequent relocation of the family from the rural South to the urban North. Ernestine’s narration alternates between the reality of the daily tensions in her household and her Hollywood-fueled fantasies of what she wishes her family circumstances were.

The play contrasts the glamorized lives depicted in the films in which Ernestine seeks escape with an examination of how the realities of segregation complicate the lives of Ernestine and her family. The family must confront the issue on a personal level when the father hastily enters into an interracial marriage with a German immigrant, Gerte, he encounters on a train. Gerte’s entry into the family also exposes the hostility of Lily, the girls’ fervently Communist aunt, who has dedicated herself to labor causes and the battle for civil rights. Articulate, ambitious, and passionate, Lily offers her nieces an outsized role model of how to navigate the injustices of a world that relegates African American women to a minor presence. Yet even Lily, who has experienced racial discrimination and Communist baiting firsthand, is not immune to the complexities posed by racial polarization in post–World War II America. Ernestine, in one of her fantasy moments, envisions Lily and Gerte dancing with each other but informs the audience that this never actually occurred. In this moment, she pines for familial, racial, and social harmony that eludes full formation in the evolving world Crumbsdepicts.

Mud, River, Stone offers a satirical meditation on race, Western narcissism, and the colonial myths and contemporary challenges of the developing world. The play follows the misadventures of Sarah and David, a successful African American couple from New York, who decide to take a break from their busy lives as an investment banker and journalist, respectively, to indulge in their dream vacation to the homeland of their ancestors. Upon arriving in Africa, the two soon find themselves in serious trouble when they get lost in a storm and end up being taken hostage at the ironically named Imperial Hotel, deep in the jungle.

Their captor, Joaquim, a former child soldier turned hotel bellhop, has simple demands: food for the starving inhabitants of his village and a blanket for his mother. "How am I to know," asks one of the negotiators, "if the blanket is an actual demand or a ‘symbolic’ demand?" Her obliviousness to the lived reality, as opposed to the romanticized fantasy, of African existence casts into relief the futility of Western efforts to help remedy a tragedy partially of their own making. Sarah and David, for their part, experience similar disillusionment. A reckoning with the actual voices and perspectives of present-day Africans, the play suggests, is a prerequisite to confronting the poverty and violence that are the legacy of colonial exploitation.

One More River to Cross: A Verbatim Fugue (2001) represents Nottage’s revival of the voices of those who endured the horrors of American slavery. To create this work, Nottage drew on more than two thousand interviews conducted in the late 1930s by representatives from the Federal Writers’ Project, who sought to document the experiences of former slaves. By portraying their stories onstage, River resurrects a history that provokes audiences to consider the continuing impact of that history on both African Americans and American society at large.

LikeCrumbs from the Table of Joy, Las Meninas delves into the complications that arise from an unlikely romantic pairing that crosses lines of race, culture, and class. Based on historical conjecture, Nottage envisions a love story between the Spanish-born Queen Marie-Therese, wife of King Louis XIV of France, and Nabo, an African little person transported from his homeland of Dahomey (present-day Benin) to the eighteenth-century royal court in Paris. The queen and Nabo forge a bond born of shared circumstances of solitude and vulnerability. They are both trapped in exile from lost, beloved worlds. Marie-Therese is a Spanish outsider at the French court and an afterthought to the faithless king to whom she is bound in a politically arranged marriage; Nabo has been enslaved as an exotic jester, a short-statured, dark-complexioned novelty gift literally delivered to the French court in a box for their amusement. Also as in Crumbs, the protagonist’s own oppression does not preclude her from exploiting others. The queen uses Nabo to fulfill the intimacy void in her life much as the king married her for reasons of political expediency. When the king decides to execute Nabo, Marie-Therese retreats behind her wall of race and royal privilege and does not try to intervene. The instinct for survival, the play suggests, can trump and compromise the fragile recognition of common humanity.

Intimate Apparel explores one woman’s search for empowerment. Nottage loosely based its protagonist, an African American spinster named Esther, on her own great grandmother. Set in New York in 1905, the play traces Esther’s quest for financial independence and love. Esther is a talented seamstress who creates elaborate undergarments for poor black prostitutes and wealthy white clients alike and dreams of owning her own upscale beauty salon for black women once she has saved enough money. She reluctantly enters into a long-distance courtship with George Armstrong, a Barbadian Panama Canal worker, who marries Esther despite his disappointment that she does not live up to his expectations. George is yet another Nottage character who is both oppressed and oppressive, raging about race discrimination while shamelessly exploiting Esther. Her true soul mate is the sweet-tempered Mr. Marks, a merchant of the fabrics Esther uses to create her apparel. Although they share an artistic appreciation of textiles as well as the loneliness that comes with outsider status—Esther is a woman of color transplanted to New York from the South, and Mr. Marks is a Jewish immigrant from Europe—they cannot transcend the cultural chasm between them. Their poignant interactions highlight the costs of the human propensity for tribalism, which often makes violence possible at the same time it renders love impossible.

In Fabulation; or, The Re-education of Undine, a companion piece to Intimate Apparel, Nottage reimagines Esther a century later as the character of Undine. Like Esther, Undine engages in a quest to stake out a new identity. Unlike Esther, however, who works her way out of isolation and poverty, Undine starts at the top and loses it all. At the beginning of the play, she is an Ivy League–educated, upwardly mobile Manhattan publicist and imperious diva. When her husband abandons her and embezzles most of her money in the process, a pregnant Undine is forced to rely on welfare and to return to her roots in a Brooklyn project with the family she repudiated many years earlier. Making a drug purchase on behalf of her grandmother, who is addicted to heroin, an appalled Undine declares, "My entire life has been engineered to avoid this very moment." As in Nottage’s other plays, reckoning with the truth of the past is essential to confronting the future. By resurrecting her connections to her origins and rediscovering the humanity of those she once rejected, Undine slowly manages to reinvent herself and rebuild her identity and marriage.

Set in a Congolese bar and brothel that serves as an oasis of sort from the civil war raging around it, Ruined illustrates the devastating impact of war on civilian populations. The brothel’s proprietor, Mama Nadi, does her best to keep the violence from breaking out between her patrons, who consist of government forces as well as rebel fighters. Both groups are responsible for the suffering of the brothel’s workers, most of whom were forced into prostitution after politically motivated rapes "ruined" their honor and desirability as wives and mothers. To create the play’s characters, Nottage drew on interviews she personally conducted with Congolese survivors.

Ruinedpresents a grim picture of the lives of its characters, struggling to survive after their horrific ordeals, and the glimmers of humanity that make their survival possible. Mama Nadi does not initially want to accept the teenaged Sophie—whose rape with a bayonet has rendered her "ruined" for sex work—into her operation, but she relents and takes her in to work as her bookkeeper, in response to a plea from Sophie’s uncle. In compromised circumstances born of the necessity to survive, the protagonists of Ruined seek dignity despite their entrapment in a nightmare. By reclaiming their voices and bringing their stories to the world at large, the play supports the defiance of women who struggle to reject the notion of themselves as ruined beyond repair and human worth.

By the Way, Meet Vera Stark pays tribute to the glamour of Hollywood’s golden era while simultaneously providing a critique of the racism that relegated performers of color to marginal roles. The play’s protagonist, Vera Stark, is an African American actor who aspires to fame in an industry that cannot perceive her as anything other than a stereotype. With little screen work available to her, Vera works a day job as a maid to a white Hollywood star, Gloria, who is struggling to reinvigorate her waning career.

The play illustrates Vera’s relentless determination to showcase her talent in an era when black women’s roles in Hollywood were narrowly confined to those of slaves or servants. The first act focuses on Vera’s tribulations as a working actor in the Depression era. The second takes place in 2003, when a panel of academics examines the legacy of Vera’s career. Their pretentious discussion is accompanied by a showing of grainy footage from a 1973 television appearance in which Vera’s rage boils over at the dismissiveness with which the host seems to regard her career as a caricature and an embarrassment. As the academics contemplate, in Vera’s absence, the significance of Vera’s legacy, the play offers a meditation on the delusions of a society determined to avoid the discomforting realities of both past and present.

Sweat offers an empathetic social commentary on the dissolution of the American Dream for non-college-educated workers in postindustrial America. Set in Reading, Pennsylvania, once a hub of thriving mills that provided well-paid union manufacturing jobs, the play follows the loss of economic security, identity, and stability in the early 2000s after those jobs moved abroad to take advantage of cheap labor. Focused on the lives and disintegrating families of two female protagonists, one white and one African American, Sweat explores the racial animosity, substance abuse, and violence engendered by despair. Its setting serves as a microcosm for the devastation of the working class across the United States.

Bibliography

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Murphy, Dwyer. "History of Omission." Guernica, 1 May 2013, www.guernicamag.com/interviews/history-of-omission. Accessed 15 Oct. 2024.

Nottage, Lynn. Interview by Victoria Myers. Interval. Interval, 14 Oct. 2015, theintervalny.com/interviews/2015/10/an-interview-with-lynn-nottage. Accessed 15 Oct. 2024.

Olopade, Dayo. "The Root Interview: Lynn Nottage on Ruined Beauty." Root, Univision Communications, 1 Mar. 2010, www.theroot.com/the-root-interview-lynn-nottage-on-ruined-beauty-1790878761. Accessed 15 Oct. 2024.

Pressley, Nelson. "Lynn Nottage: A Playwright Made for DC Audiences Rarely Sees Her Work Produced Here." Washington Post, 10 Apr. 2014, www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/theater‗dance/lynn-nottage-a-playwright-made-for-dc-audiences-rarely-sees-her-work-produced-here/2014/04/10/b9663312-bc4e-11e3-96ae-f2c36d2b1245‗story.html. Accessed 15 Oct. 2024.

Weinert-Kendt, Rob. "How Lynn Nottage, Inveterate Wanderer, Found Her Way to Reading and Sweat." American Theatre, 10 July 2015, www.americantheatre.org/2015/07/10/how-lynn-nottage-inveterate-wanderer-found-her-way-to-reading-and-sweat. Accessed 15 Oct. 2024.