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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I wrote 'Ruined' and 'Vera Stark' at the same time. That's just how my brain functions - when I'm dwelling someplace very heavy, I need a release.
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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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Like Alice Walker and Toni Morrison, I try to balance reality with how we'd like the world to be.
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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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By the time I reached 50, I'd accumulated many unresolved fears and desires.
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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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I'm a schizophrenic writer.
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I think that human beings were incredibly resilient; otherwise, we wouldn't keep going.
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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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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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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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My hobby is raising my children.
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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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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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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'm always hyperaware of the way in which working people are portrayed on the stage.
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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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Each play I write has its own unique origin story.
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Broadway's never my end goal because of the plays I write. These are tough plays. Of course there's a lot of humor, but my goal is just to reach as wide an audience as possible, however that happens.
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For me, playwriting is sharing my experiences, telling my stories.
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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 person whose work introduced me to the craft was Lorraine Hansberry. The person who taught me to love the craft was Tennessee Williams. The person who really taught me the power of the craft was August Wilson, and the person who taught me the political heft of the craft was Arthur Miller.