Lynn Nottage Quotes
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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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We use metaphors to express our own truths.
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When you begin a play, you're going to have to spend a lot of time with those characters, so those characters are going to have to be rich enough that you want to take a very long journey with them. That's how I begin thinking about what I want to write about and who I want to write about.
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For me, playwriting is sharing my experiences, telling my stories.
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Winning the second Pulitzer firmly places me in conversation with this culture.
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Each play I write has its own unique origin story.
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I think sometimes you need distance to reflect.
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African American women in particular have incredible buying power. Statistically, we go to the movies more than anyone. We have made Tyler Perry's career. His films open with $25 million almost consistently.
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I feel like 'Sweat' arrived on Broadway at the moment that it needed to. I feel like a commercial audience was not prepared for 'Ruined' or 'Intimate Apparel' for many different reasons.
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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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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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I think of myself as a healing artist.
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It's very important for me to have dialogues across racial lines.
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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.
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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 am a Tony voter; it is an honor that I take seriously. Each season, I enter the process with a degree of enthusiasm and optimism, which dissipates as I slowly plow through show after show.
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The presence of a bed changes the way people interact.
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I've been asked a lot why didn't 'Ruined' go to Broadway. It was the most successful play that Manhattan Theatre Club has ever had in that particular space, and yet we couldn't find a home on Broadway.
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The stage is the last bastion of segregation.
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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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I like to go into a space, listen, absorb, and then interpret.
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'Intimate Apparel' is a lyrical meditation on one woman's loneliness and desire. 'Fabulation' is a very fast-paced play of the MTV generation.
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I teach at Columbia, and I'm always looking for books I can lose myself in during the 45 minutes I'm on the train.
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It's much easier to conjure characters strictly from your imagination than to have to think about whether you're representing people in a truthful way.