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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The presence of a bed changes the way people interact.
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Broadway is a closed ecosystem.
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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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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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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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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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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'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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By the sheer act of writing, we are trying to place value on the stories that we're invested in.
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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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I am a storyteller by trade.
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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 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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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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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 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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I like to go into a space, listen, absorb, and then interpret.
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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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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.
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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.