Lynn Nottage

Lynn Nottage (born November 2, 1964, Brooklyn, New York, U.S.) is an American playwright whose work often focuses on marginalized communities, the working class, and race relations in America. Nottage has said of her work, “In all my plays, I’m trying to figure out how someone who feels marginalized, invisible, can at the same time be powerful and self-possessed. My characters are fighting to be seen in a world that fundamentally doesn’t want to recognize their power.” She was the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama twice, for Ruined (2009) and Sweat (2017).

Childhood and first plays

Nottage’s mother, Ruby Nottage, was a teacher and principal, and her father, Wallace Nottage, was a child psychologist. Her parents were heavily involved in social justice and civil rights campaigns, and they took their daughter to see the productions of Black theater groups in New York City, such as the Negro Ensemble Company. Nottage credits her parents’ encouragement with influencing and solidifying the themes in her work as a dramatist. She started writing plays at age eight and completed her first full-length drama in high school. The play, The Darker Side of Verona, focused on an African American Shakespearean acting troupe touring the American South. Nottage submitted the play to a young authors competition and was selected as one of four artists who received mentoring from composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim.

Education, influences, and early career

In 1982 Nottage graduated from the High School of Music and Art (now the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts) in Manhattan and enrolled in Brown University with a scholarship to study pre-med. In 2023 she told The Paris Review, “I went to Brown knowing that I was artistic, but I was also very good at math and science.…There was no part of me that ever wanted to be a doctor, and taking mostly science courses overwhelmed me because I didn’t have the investment or the interest.” She took playwriting classes and found another mentor in George Houston Bass, a professor and playwright who had been poet Langston Hughes’s secretary. Nottage also drew inspiration from the works of such prominent African American female writers as Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Lorraine Hansberry, and Ntozake Shange. After graduating from Brown in 1986 she decided to pursue her artistic passion and attend the Yale School of Drama, from which she earned a Master of Fine Arts in 1989. Nottage received a doctorate of fine arts from Brown in 2011.

One of Nottage’s first jobs after graduating from Yale was with Amnesty International as a national press officer. She worked in this role for nearly four years before switching gears to focus on her writing full time. Among Nottage’s work from this period was a monologue for the musical A…My Name Is Still Alice. In 1993 she wrote and produced Poof!, a short comedy about a housewife in an abusive marriage whose wishes regarding the fate of her husband come true. It debuted that year at the Actors Theatre of Louisville in Kentucky.

In 1995 Nottage premiered her work Crumbs from the Table of Joy at Second Stage Theater in New York. The play focuses on a Southern Black teenager in the 1950s whose family has moved to Brooklyn after her mother’s death. It received positive reviews and created buzz around the writer on the New York theater scene. The following year it was staged at Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago; in a review published in the Chicago Reader critic Gabrielle Kaplan compared the play’s structure to Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie (produced in 1944 and published in 1945) and commended its avoidance of Black female stereotypes.

Career breakthrough: Intimate Apparel, Ruined, and By the Way, Meet Vera Stark

Nottage’s breakthrough in theater came with Intimate Apparel, which centers on a Black seamstress in turn-of-the-20th-century New York. The play was inspired by the experience of Nottage’s great-grandmother and addresses the erasure of the Black working class from historical relevance. It had its world premiere in Baltimore in early 2003 before moving Off-Broadway the following year, with Viola Davis in the lead role. Among the honors the play received was the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for best play of the 2003–04 season.

In 2007 Nottage was awarded a MacArthur Foundation “genius” fellowship. The following year she premiered Ruined at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago. The play is an examination of women’s lives and their experience of gender-based violence during the civil war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo between 1998 and 2003. Although the play draws from Bertolt Brecht’s chronicle play of the Thirty Years’ War, Mother Courage and Her Children (produced in 1941 and published in 1949), it was also informed by a trip Nottage made to Uganda, where she interviewed former soldiers of the Lord’s Resistance Army and women living in refugee camps. In 2009 Nottage received the Pulitzer Prize for Ruined, which was cited as a “searing drama…that compels audiences to face the horror of wartime rape and brutality while still finding affirmation of life and hope amid hopelessness.”

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Nottage turned to satire in 2011 with By the Way, Meet Vera Stark, a play set in 1930s Hollywood that explores the lives of Black actresses working in the film industry’s exploitative studio system. In 2019 Nottage told Slate that she wrote Vera Stark at the same time as Ruined. “I very specifically wanted to write something that didn’t require a certain kind of research. I could look at movies and sit down and write.” She also discussed Vera Stark’s difference in tone from many of her more well-known works. “I think people forget that I’m a satirist as well and that I can be very, very funny.…I think there’s a way in which you can enter and expose stereotypes when you’re deploying humor that becomes much more complicated in drama. You can press right up to the edge.”

Plays of the American working class: Sweat and Clyde’s

In 2015 Nottage premiered Sweat, which won her second Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Set in a bar in a shuttered steel town in Pennsylvania, Sweat received rave reviews from critics and audiences for capturing a realistic portrait of the American working class and the growing economic crisis in the Rust Belt. The details of the play came from more than two years of interviews conducted by Nottage as she traveled through former steel industry towns in Pennsylvania. Although it takes place between 2000 and 2008, Sweat’s debut amid the 2016 presidential campaign of Donald Trump strongly influenced its critical reception. In a review of a 2017 production in New York City, The New York Times called the play “the first work from a major American playwright to summon, with empathy and without judgment, the nationwide anxiety that helped put Donald J. Trump in the White House.” Sweat also earned Nottage her first Tony Award nomination, in 2017 for best play.

Nottage followed up in 2021 with Clyde’s (originally titled Floyd’s), another examination of marginalized characters in blue-collar Pennsylvania. Featuring more comedy compared with Sweat, Clyde’s is set in a sandwich shop that employs formerly incarcerated workers, who share their stories of the difficulties of reentering society after prison as well as their hopes and dreams. In 2022 the play was nominated for the Tony Award for best play.

Musical productions and other projects

Outside of strict drama, Nottage has written the books for popular musicals, including The Secret Life of Bees (2019), an adaptation of Sue Monk Kidd’s 2002 novel, and the box-office smash MJ the Musical (2022), which features the music of pop superstar Michael Jackson and was nominated for 10 Tony Awards, including best book of a musical. Nottage also collaborated with the Metropolitan Opera on a musical adaptation of Intimate Apparel, with music by Ricky Ian Gordon. The opera version opened in previews in January 2020 but was quickly shut down because of the COVID-19 pandemic. It reopened Off-Broadway in 2022. Two years later The Highlands, an opera featuring music by Carlos Simon and a libretto by Nottage and her daughter, Ruby Aiyo Gerber, debuted as a workshop production in Cincinnati.

Other projects that Nottage has written or produced include the comedy film Side Streets (1998), the second season (1995–96) of the TV series Gullah, Gullah Island, and the first season (2017) of the drama She’s Gotta Have It, the latter of which is based on director Spike Lee’s 1986 debut feature film.

Teaching career and other honors

Since 2014 Nottage has served on the faculty of the theater program at Columbia University. Among her many additional honors, she was named one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people in 2019 and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.