Lynn Nottage Quotes
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In many ways, I consider those to be my formative years, because when you're in school, you have a distant relationship to the world in that most of what you're learning is from books and lectures. But at Amnesty, I came face to face with realities in a very direct and harsh way.
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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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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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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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I'm always hyperaware of the way in which working people are portrayed on the stage.
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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 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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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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'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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The more you go to a theatre and the more you hear stories you aren't necessarily familiar with, the more open you become.
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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 a schizophrenic writer.
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Plays are getting smaller and smaller, not because playwrights minds are shrinking but because of the economics.
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I think that human beings were incredibly resilient; otherwise, we wouldn't keep going.
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For me, playwriting is sharing my experiences, telling my stories.
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I think of myself as a healing artist.
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Each play I write has its own unique origin story.
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It's very easy, when we're reading those articles on the 20th page of 'The New York Times,' to distance ourselves and say, 'It's someone else.'
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If the Tony Awards want to remain relevant in the American theater conversation, then they need to embrace the true diversity of voices that populate the American theater.
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In the business of war, the role of women is really to maintain normalcy and ensure that there is cultural continuity.
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I try to be led by my curiosity.