Lynn Nottage Quotes

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.

- Lynn Nottage

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.

- Lynn Nottage

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.

- Lynn Nottage

My parents are avid consumers of art, collectors of African American paintings, and have always gone to the theater. My mother has always been an activist, too. As long as I can remember, we were marching in lines.

- Lynn Nottage

'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.'

- Lynn Nottage

The people sometimes who are closest to us are the ones who bear the brunt of our frustration.

- Lynn Nottage

I'm a schizophrenic writer.

- Lynn Nottage

In the business of war, the role of women is really to maintain normalcy and ensure that there is cultural continuity.

- Lynn Nottage

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.

- Lynn Nottage

All of my plays are about people who have been marginalized... erased from the public record.

- Lynn Nottage

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.

- Lynn Nottage

I'm a contemporary playwright in a postmodern world.

- Lynn Nottage

I think folks who are resistant to engaging in art become less so once they encounter art that really reflects them.

- Lynn Nottage

Plays are getting smaller and smaller, not because playwrights minds are shrinking but because of the economics.

- Lynn Nottage

It remains an incredible struggle for women in theater, and, in particular, playwrights and directors, to get their work seen and to not only get seen, but to get it to Broadway.

- Lynn Nottage

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.

- Lynn Nottage

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.

- 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.

- Lynn Nottage

I don't think any of us could predict Trump. Trump is the stuff of nightmares. But in talking to people, I knew there was a tremendous level of disaffection and anger and sorrow. I know people felt misrepresented and voiceless.

- Lynn Nottage

I was really interested in the way in which poverty and economic stagnation were transforming and corrupting the American narrative.

- Lynn Nottage

In many ways, I consider those to be my formative years, because when you're in school, you have a distant relationship to the world in that most of what you're learning is from books and lectures. But at Amnesty, I came face to face with realities in a very direct and harsh way.

- Lynn Nottage

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.

- Lynn Nottage

A lot of the factories that had been the bedrock of many small cities were being shut down, which led me to investigate what I'm calling the 'de-industrial revolution.'

- Lynn Nottage

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.

- Lynn Nottage

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.

- Lynn Nottage

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.

- Lynn Nottage

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.

- Lynn Nottage

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.

- Lynn Nottage

Even in Congo, where conflicts are happening, people have births, weddings, deaths, and celebrations.

- Lynn Nottage

I can't quite remember the exact moment when I became obsessed with writing a play about the seemingly endless war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, but I knew that I wanted to somehow tell the stories of the Congolese women caught in the cross-fire.

- Lynn Nottage

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.

- Lynn Nottage

I love my people's history. I feel a huge responsibility to tell the stories of my past and my ancestors' past.

- Lynn Nottage

I like to go into a space, listen, absorb, and then interpret.

- Lynn Nottage

I always thought of my mother as a warrior woman, and I became interested in pursuing stories of women who invent lives in order to survive.

- Lynn Nottage

I knew that there was a great deal of depth and life that was sitting just beyond my mother's gaze.

- Lynn Nottage

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.

- Lynn Nottage

Like Alice Walker and Toni Morrison, I try to balance reality with how we'd like the world to be.

- 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.

- Lynn Nottage

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.

- Lynn Nottage

Silence is complicity. I believe that.

- Lynn Nottage

There were not a lot of women in the theater department - it was really run by men, and so the message was that women can be onstage, but women can't really be backstage.

- Lynn Nottage

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.

- Lynn Nottage

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.

- Lynn Nottage

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.

- Lynn Nottage

By the time I reached 50, I'd accumulated many unresolved fears and desires.

- Lynn Nottage

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.

- Lynn Nottage

I would like there to be gender equity. I would like the Broadway season to reflect sort of the demographic of the country.

- Lynn Nottage

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.

- Lynn Nottage

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.

- Lynn Nottage

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.

- Lynn Nottage

Women are standing up and leaning forward and asserting their power.

- Lynn Nottage

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.

- Lynn Nottage

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.

- Lynn Nottage

I'm always hyperaware of the way in which working people are portrayed on the stage.

- Lynn Nottage

When I sat in rooms with middle-aged white men, I heard them speaking like young black men in America. They had been solidly middle class for the majority of their working careers, but now they were feeling angry, disaffected, and in some cases, they actually had tears in their eyes.

- Lynn Nottage

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.

- Lynn Nottage

Winning the second Pulitzer firmly places me in conversation with this culture.

- Lynn Nottage

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

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.'

- Lynn Nottage

The presence of a bed changes the way people interact.

- Lynn Nottage

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.

- Lynn Nottage

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.

- Lynn Nottage

The theatre should reflect America as it's lived in today. And that is a multicultural America.

- Lynn Nottage

By the sheer act of writing, we are trying to place value on the stories that we're invested in.

- Lynn Nottage

The act of saying what you do helps shape you as an artist.

- Lynn Nottage

It's very important for me to have dialogues across racial lines.

- Lynn Nottage

It's incumbent on us to reach beyond the confines of the institutions that traditionally produce art and find new ways to get it to the people.

- Lynn Nottage

We use metaphors to express our own truths.

- Lynn Nottage

For me, playwriting is sharing my experiences, telling my stories.

- Lynn Nottage

My hobby is raising my children.

- Lynn Nottage

In my family history, there are generations of women who were abandoned by men. It's one of the themes of my family.

- Lynn Nottage

For me, the first thing is to tell a good story.

- Lynn Nottage

Ultimately, we're incredibly resilient creatures. People really do get on with the business of living.

- Lynn Nottage

I think that human beings were incredibly resilient; otherwise, we wouldn't keep going.

- Lynn Nottage

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.

- Lynn Nottage

I'm interested in people who are dwelling outside the mainstream. And very often, those people happen to be woman of color.

- Lynn Nottage

Broadway is a closed ecosystem.

- Lynn Nottage

American audiences very rarely deal with material outside their borders.

- Lynn Nottage

I am interested in people living in the margins of society, and I do have a mission to tell the stories of women of colour in particular. I feel we've been present throughout history, but our voices have been neglected.

- Lynn Nottage

In listening to the narratives of the Congolese, I came to terms with the extent to which their bodies had become battlefields.

- Lynn Nottage

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.

- Lynn Nottage

Growing up in New York City, I'd flirted with the idea of driving, but between the subway and the sidewalks, I'd never needed to learn.

- Lynn Nottage

The more you go to a theatre and the more you hear stories you aren't necessarily familiar with, the more open you become.

- Lynn Nottage

The stage is the last bastion of segregation.

- Lynn Nottage

We live in a global society, and I don't think we can talk about, quote unquote, 'American themes' anymore.

- Lynn Nottage

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.'

- Lynn Nottage

When you're fighting for an increasingly smaller portion of the pie, you turn against each other; you create reasons to hate each other.

- Lynn Nottage

I see procrastination and research as part of my artistic process.

- Lynn Nottage

By and large, the theatre establishment is run by a white majority.

- Lynn Nottage

I do see myself as an old-fashioned storyteller. But there's always a touch of the political in my plays.

- Lynn Nottage

I am a storyteller by trade.

- Lynn Nottage

I love Twitter.

- Lynn Nottage

What I often do when I'm writing, if I can't find that story, I go out and I hunt for it.

- Lynn Nottage

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.

- Lynn Nottage

There's never any ebb in human misery.

- Lynn Nottage

The essence of creativity is to look beyond where you can actually see. I don't want to dwell in same place too long.

- Lynn Nottage

I think sometimes you need distance to reflect.

- Lynn Nottage

Each play I write has its own unique origin story.

- Lynn Nottage

Replace judgment with curiosity.

- Lynn Nottage

I try to be led by my curiosity.

- Lynn Nottage

I think of myself as a healing artist.

- Lynn Nottage

I need a release from whatever I'm writing.

- Lynn Nottage