Lynn Nottage Quotes
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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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Winning the second Pulitzer firmly places me in conversation with this culture.
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Broadway is a closed ecosystem.
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The presence of a bed changes the way people interact.
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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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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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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'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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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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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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By the sheer act of writing, we are trying to place value on the stories that we're invested in.
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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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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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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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I am a storyteller by trade.
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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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We use metaphors to express our own truths.
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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 like to go into a space, listen, absorb, and then interpret.
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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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Who wants to see the same play again? I certainly don't want to write the same play again and again.
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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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The stage is the last bastion of segregation.
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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.