Lynn Nottage Quotes
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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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In listening to the narratives of the Congolese, I came to terms with the extent to which their bodies had become battlefields.
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For me, the first thing is to tell a good story.
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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 parents are avid consumers of art, collectors of African American paintings, and have always gone to the theater. My mother has always been an activist, too. As long as I can remember, we were marching in lines.
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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 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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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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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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I'm always hyperaware of the way in which working people are portrayed on the stage.
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Each play I write has its own unique origin story.
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I'm a schizophrenic writer.
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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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I think that human beings were incredibly resilient; otherwise, we wouldn't keep going.
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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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I think sometimes you need distance to reflect.
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Broadway is a closed ecosystem.
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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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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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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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Winning the second Pulitzer firmly places me in conversation with this culture.
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I wouldn't say I see my work as having a political ideology. Lynn Nottage certainly has a political ideology. I think that the work is an extension of who I am, but I don't think that when I write the play I'm looking to push the audience one way or another.
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For me, playwriting is sharing my experiences, telling my stories.