Lynn Nottage

Life

Nottage was born in Brooklyn and is a graduate of LaGuardia High School of Music and Art, Brown University, and the Yale School of Drama. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2005, and a MacArthur Grant in 2007.

Nottage is married to filmmaker Tony Gerber, with whom she has two children, Ruby Aiyo and Melkamu Gerber.

Early life

Born in Brooklyn on November 2, 1964 to a schoolteacher and a child psychologist, Nottage attended New York's High School of Music & Art and Saint Ann's School. Inspired by school productions of Annie and The Wiz, she penned her first play, The Darker Side of Verona, which told the story of an African American Shakespearean company. After attending Brown University and the Yale School of Drama, Nottage worked in Amnesty International's press office for four years.

Career

She is the co-founder of a production company, Market Road Films, whose most recent projects include The Notorious Mr. Bout, directed by Tony Gerber and Maxim Pozdorovkin (Premiere/Sundance 2014); First to Fall, directed by Rachel Beth Anderson (Premiere/ IDFA, 2013); and Remote Control (Premiere/Busan 2013-New Currents Award). Over the years, she has developed original projects for HBO, Sidney Kimmel Entertainment, Showtime, This is That, and Harpo Productions.

Nottage's plays have been produced Off-Broadway and regionally by The Acting Company, Actors Theatre of Louisville, Alliance Theatre Company, Arena Stage, Capital Repertory Theatre, City Theatre, Crossroads Theatre, Playwrights Horizons, Manhattan Theatre Club, San Jose Repertory Theatre, Second Stage Theatre, Steppenwolf Theatre Company, Vineyard Theatre, Yale Repertory Theatre, and the Guthrie, among others.

Plays

One of her best-known plays is Intimate Apparel, co-commissioned and produced at Baltimore's Center Stage, where it premiered in February 2003 and South Coast Repertory. It was highly acclaimed in its Off-Broadway production in 2004, starring Viola Davis. She wrote a companion piece to Intimate Apparel, the OBIE award-winning Fabulation, or the Re-Education of Undine, which is set 100 years later. The West Coast premiere of her Crumbs from the Table of Joy, at South Coast Repertory, earned two NAACP Theatre Awards for performance.

Nottage's play, Ruined, dramatizes the plight of Congolese women surviving civil war. It premiered in 2007 in the Goodman Theater (Chicago) New Stages Series, and transferred to Off-Broadway at the Manhattan Theatre Club. Ruined was awarded the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Nottage was a finalist for the 2009 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize for Ruined. Her other plays include the children’s musical, A Walk Through Time; Mud, River, Stone (Blackburn Prize finalist); Por’knockers; and Las Meninas.

Her play Poof! (Heideman Award) was broadcast on PBS in 2002, with the cast that featured Rosie Perez and Viola Davis. It was initially presented in 1993 at the Actors Theatre Of Louisville (Louisville, Kentucky) during the Humana Festival of New American Plays.

Her play By the Way, Meet Vera Stark premiered Off-Broadway at Second Stage Theatre on May 9, 2011 with direction by Jo Bonney, and received rave reviews. The play is a "funny and irreverent look at racial stereotypes in Hollywood." The play was nominated for the 2012 Drama Desk Award, Outstanding Play. The play ran at the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles in September 2012, starring Sanaa Lathan, who played the role of the maid who becomes a stage star.

Nottage contributed to the "dance-theatre musical" written Stephen Flaherty and Lynn Ahrens titled In Your Arms which premiered at the Old Globe Theatre, San Diego, in September 2015. The piece consists of ten vignettes and was directed and choreographed by Christopher Gattelli. Her vignette is titled A Wedding Dance and was performed by Marija Juliette Abney and Adesola Osakalumi with The Company.

Sweat

She received a commission from Oregon Shakespeare Festival and the Arena Stage. The play that she wrote as a result, Sweat, was presented at the festival in Ashland, Oregon from July 29, 2015 to October 31, 2015, directed by Kate Whoriskey. The play takes place in Reading, Pennsylvania, and involves steel workers who have been locked out of their factory workplace. The play was produced at the Arena Stage (Washington, DC) from January 15, 2016 to February 21, 2016, directed by Whoriskey. Nottage won the 2015-16 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize for this play. Sweat premiered Off-Broadway at the Public Theater on October 18, 2016 (previews), officially on November 3, again directed by Whoriskey. The play closed on December 18, 2016. Sweat opened on Broadway at Studio 54 on March 4, 2017 in previews, officially on March 26, 2017. This marks the Broadway debut of a Nottage play. The Broadway cast features the Off-Broadway cast, with the exception of the role of Jessie, played by Alison Wright.

Sweat was a finalist for the 2016 Edward M. Kennedy Prize for Drama. Sweat was again a finalist for the 2017 Edward M. Kennedy Prize for Drama Inspired by American History. The award is administered by Columbia University. The play won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

Other

On May 13, 2009, Nottage spoke at a public reception in Washington, DC following a United States Senate Foreign Relations joint subcommittee hearing entitled "Confronting Rape and Other Forms of Violence Against Women in Conflict Zones," with case studies on the Democratic Republic of Congo and Sudan.

Themes

The Guardian noted: "Nottage’s...work has garnered praise for bringing challenging and often forgotten, stories onto the stage. ... Ruined explored the use of rape as a weapon against women in the Democratic Republic of Congo, while Intimate Apparel focused on a lonely black seamstress working in New York in 1905....Future areas the 51-year-old is keen to explore in her plays includes the American prison industrial complex, which is “destroying the lives of so many men of colour” but is barely talked about in the national conversation or on the stage. Yet Nottage also expressed disappointment that her work was constantly defined by both her own race and gender, unlike her white male counterparts."

Honors

Nottage has been awarded the 2017 Award of Merit Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, for "an outstanding playwright for her body of work".

Nottage has been named a Residency One Playwright for the 2018–19 season by the Signature Theatre Company. The program "involves an intensive exploration of the writer’s body of work."

She won the 2016 PEN/Laura Pels Award, Master American Dramatist.

She has been awarded playwriting fellowships from Manhattan Theatre Club, New Dramatists, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. She is also the recipient of a Playwrights Horizons Amblin/Dreamworks commission and a National Endowment for the Arts/Theatre Communications Group grant for a year-long residency at Freedom Repertory Theater in Philadelphia. Nottage is an alumnus of New Dramatists. In 2010, she was awarded the Steinberg Distinguished Playwright Award, which includes a prize of $200,000.

In announcing the MacArthur Fellowship for 2007, the foundation said: "Lynn Nottage is an original voice in American theater..."

She received the Guggenheim Grant, Drama and Performance Art, in 2005. She received the PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater Award for a playwright in mid-career in 2004.

She was a finalist for the 2001 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize for Mud, River, Stone.

Works