Lynn Nottage Quotes
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I love my people's history. I feel a huge responsibility to tell the stories of my past and my ancestors' past.
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By the time I reached 50, I'd accumulated many unresolved fears and desires.
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I always thought of my mother as a warrior woman, and I became interested in pursuing stories of women who invent lives in order to survive.
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I'm a schizophrenic writer.
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When I sat in rooms with middle-aged white men, I heard them speaking like young black men in America. They had been solidly middle class for the majority of their working careers, but now they were feeling angry, disaffected, and in some cases, they actually had tears in their eyes.
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I don't think any of us could predict Trump. Trump is the stuff of nightmares. But in talking to people, I knew there was a tremendous level of disaffection and anger and sorrow. I know people felt misrepresented and voiceless.
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'Ruined' was a play which was somewhat of an anomaly in that I did not take a commission until it was finished because I really wanted to explore the subject matter unencumbered. Otherwise, I felt as though I'd have the voice of dramaturges and literary managers saying, 'This is great, but we'll never be able to produce it.'
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People probably have different philosophies about this, but I think that when you're first shaping the play and trying to find a character, the initial actors that develop it end up imprinting on it - you hear their voices; you hear their rhythms. You can't help but to begin to write toward them during the rehearsal process.
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Like Alice Walker and Toni Morrison, I try to balance reality with how we'd like the world to be.
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Once working people discover that, collectively, we have more power than we do as individual silos, then we become an incredibly powerful force. But I think that there are powers that be that are invested in us remaining divided along racial lines, along economic lines.
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My hobby is raising my children.
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I'm always hyperaware of the way in which working people are portrayed on the stage.
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I think that human beings were incredibly resilient; otherwise, we wouldn't keep going.
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We need to diversify the people who are backstage and producing and marketing these shows. It's the limitations of these people that are holding Broadway back.
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Each play I write has its own unique origin story.
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I find my characters and stories in many varied places; sometimes they pop out of newspaper articles, obscure historical texts, lively dinner party conversations and some even crawl out of the dusty remote recesses of my imagination.
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For me, playwriting is sharing my experiences, telling my stories.
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I always describe race as the final taboo in American theatre. There's a real reluctance to have that conversation in an open, honest way on the stage.
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If you're looking at the people who head the institutions, there are very few African Americans or people of colour. I'm talking about the major theatres that position themselves as serving all audiences. What you find is, by and large, people who are shaping what we see, and the people who are the tastemakers are white.
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In senior year at college, Paula Vogel was my playwriting teacher; she is the first person to introduce me to the notion that a woman could actually forge a career in the theatre. Up until then, the possibility seemed remote and inaccessible, as I had very few role models who directly touched my life.
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Broadway is a closed ecosystem.
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I think of myself as a healing artist.
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By the sheer act of writing, we are trying to place value on the stories that we're invested in.
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The more you go to a theatre and the more you hear stories you aren't necessarily familiar with, the more open you become.