Replace judgment with curiosity.
Lynn Nottage
'Intimate Apparel' is a lyrical meditation on one woman's loneliness and desire. 'Fabulation' is a very fast-paced play of the MTV generation.
'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.'
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.
For me, playwriting is sharing my experiences, telling my stories.
I see procrastination and research as part of my artistic process.
The people sometimes who are closest to us are the ones who bear the brunt of our frustration.
Women are standing up and leaning forward and asserting their power.
I like to go into a space, listen, absorb, and then interpret.
There was no way I was going to write about Africa and not include the triumphant continuity of life that had also been part of my experience there. It's not just war and famine all the time.
I try to be led by my curiosity.
When you're fighting for an increasingly smaller portion of the pie, you turn against each other; you create reasons to hate each other.
My interest in theatre and storytelling began in my mother's kitchen. It was a meeting place for my mother's large circle of friends.
The essence of creativity is to look beyond where you can actually see. I don't want to dwell in same place too long.
I was really interested in the way in which poverty and economic stagnation were transforming and corrupting the American narrative.
I'm a schizophrenic writer.
The act of saying what you do helps shape you as an artist.
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.
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.
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.
I think sometimes you need distance to reflect.
My fears about where theater is going - it's the Hollywood model, where people are chasing the almighty dollar and making commercial decisions based on nothing more than generating income for themselves and their theaters.
It's very important for me to have dialogues across racial lines.
The theatre should reflect America as it's lived in today. And that is a multicultural America.
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.
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.
Silence is complicity. I believe that.
By and large, the theatre establishment is run by a white majority.
I'm interested in people who are dwelling outside the mainstream. And very often, those people happen to be woman of color.
All of my plays are about people who have been marginalized... erased from the public record.
We live in a global society, and I don't think we can talk about, quote unquote, 'American themes' anymore.
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.
Like Alice Walker and Toni Morrison, I try to balance reality with how we'd like the world to be.
I wonder: Would there be a black president if people hadn't already begun imagining, through film and television, that a black man is president? It's self-actualization.
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.
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.
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.
American audiences very rarely deal with material outside their borders.
The great thing about 'Vera Stark' is that my research was watching movies, screwball comedies, so I could literally sit back and relax.
I was repeatedly told that there isn't an African American woman who can open a show on Broadway. I said, 'Well, how do we know? How do we know if we don't do it?' I said, 'I think you're wrong.'
Ultimately, we're incredibly resilient creatures. People really do get on with the business of living.
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.
In my family history, there are generations of women who were abandoned by men. It's one of the themes of my family.
If you lead with the anger, it will turn off the audience. And what I want is the audience to engage with the material and to listen and then to ask questions. I think that 'Ruined' was very successful at doing that.
My grandfather was a Pullman porter, and my father put his way through college by cleaning floors at night in the libraries. I understand that working people are in some way the bedrock of my existence and the existence of many people here.
Before I start, I create a set list that I listen to while I'm writing. For 'Intimate Apparel,' I loaded Erik Satie, Scott Joplin, klezmer music, and the American jazz performer and composer Reginald Robinson.
I think that human beings were incredibly resilient; otherwise, we wouldn't keep going.
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.
By the sheer act of writing, we are trying to place value on the stories that we're invested in.
I wrote 'Ruined' and 'Vera Stark' at the same time. That's just how my brain functions - when I'm dwelling someplace very heavy, I need a release.
