The great thing about 'Vera Stark' is that my research was watching movies, screwball comedies, so I could literally sit back and relax.
— Lynn Nottage
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.
By the sheer act of writing, we are trying to place value on the stories that we're invested in.
I try to be led by my curiosity.
Silence is complicity. I believe that.
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.
I think of myself as a healing artist.
I see procrastination and research as part of my artistic process.
By and large, the theatre establishment is run by a white majority.
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.
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.
I'm always hyperaware of the way in which working people are portrayed on the stage.
What I often do when I'm writing, if I can't find that story, I go out and I hunt for it.
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.
Saying, 'I'm going to create jobs' is great, but before you create jobs, something has to be offered to alleviate some of the suffering now.
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.
I love my people's history. I feel a huge responsibility to tell the stories of my past and my ancestors' past.
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.
Replace judgment with curiosity.
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 think sometimes you need distance to reflect.
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.
It is such a joy to join a legacy of amazing female playwrights who have managed to break through the glass ceiling and reinvigorate the Broadway stage by bringing a fresh and necessary perspective.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.'
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.
There is an enduring feeling that women can write domestic dramas but don't have the muscularity or the vision to write state-of-the-nation narratives.
Even in Congo, where conflicts are happening, people have births, weddings, deaths, and celebrations.
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.
The act of saying what you do helps shape you as an artist.
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'm interested in people who are dwelling outside the mainstream. And very often, those people happen to be woman of color.
The more you go to a theatre and the more you hear stories you aren't necessarily familiar with, the more open you become.
In listening to the narratives of the Congolese, I came to terms with the extent to which their bodies had become battlefields.
I am a storyteller by trade.
As a woman of color, slowly and with some coercing, the not-for-profit theaters around the country are beginning to recognize and embrace the power of our stories, but with regards to Broadway and other commercial venues, we remain very much marginalized and excluded from that larger creative conversation.
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.
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.
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.
I think that human beings were incredibly resilient; otherwise, we wouldn't keep going.
'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.'
Here's the dilemma of the modern age: There used to be actions that workers could take, in the form of a strike. But now, that's being pre-empted by lockouts. They don't even have that leverage to protect their jobs.
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.
American audiences very rarely deal with material outside their borders.
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 know what I'm trying to say, so I'm always open to learning how to say it.
