Lynn Nottage Quotes
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When you're fighting for an increasingly smaller portion of the pie, you turn against each other; you create reasons to hate each other.
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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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For me, playwriting is sharing my experiences, telling my stories.
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I try to be led by my curiosity.
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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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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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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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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 think of myself as a healing artist.
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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 important for me to have dialogues across racial lines.
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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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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 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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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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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 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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I remain committed to telling the stories of women of the African diaspora, particularly those stories that don't often find their way into the mainstream media.
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I like to go into a space, listen, absorb, and then interpret.
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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.
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There were not a lot of women in the theater department - it was really run by men, and so the message was that women can be onstage, but women can't really be backstage.