Meet the Playwright, Part I: On Lynn Nottage
The celebrated writer behind CRUMBS FROM THE TABLE OF JOY
“Is there a better living American playwright than Lynn Nottage?” renowned theater critic Terry Teachout asked in a 2021 Wall Street Journal review.
For many, the answer is simple: there is not. The playwright of Crumbs from the Table of Joy — onstage at Lantern Theater Company November 9 through December 17, 2023 — is one of our time’s most prolific, most empathetic, and most surprising writers.
New York has always been central in Nottage’s life. She was born in 1964 in Brooklyn. Her mother was a schoolteacher and principal, her father was a child psychologist, and she has spoken about how growing up in New York City with these particular parents nourished her creativity. It was at Manhattan’s Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School, a magnet school for performing arts, where she wrote her first full-length play: The Darker Side of Verona, featuring an African-American Shakespeare troupe traveling in the South. She earned a BA from Brown, an MFA from Yale University’s School of Drama, and a doctorate in fine art also from Brown.
That high school play would lead to one of the most respected and praised playwriting careers in modern American theater. Her deeply researched — and deeply rooted — plays have earned her a MacArthur “Genius Grant” fellowship and the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, the “largest and oldest award for women+ playwrights of English-speaking theater,” according to the organization. Among many other honors, she has also won the PEN/Laura Pels “Master American Dramatist” Award, the Doris Duke Artist Award, the Nelson A. Rockefeller Award for Creativity, and a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship for Drama and Performance Art. One of Nottage’s most prestigious awards is the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and Nottage is the only woman to win that distinction twice.
Nottage’s prolific career spans comedy, drama, and plays that live in between the two, and her work is always deeply grounded in place and circumstance. The comedy By the Way, Meet Vera Stark tells a decades-spanning story about Black maid who becomes a film actor in the 1930s. Ruined (for which she won her first Pulitzer) is a devastating drama set in a bar in civil-war-torn Democratic Republic of the Congo. Intimate Apparel follows a seamstress in early 20th century New York; Crumbs from the Table of Joy is set in 1950s Brooklyn. And Sweat (for which she won her second Pulitzer), is set among factory workers in Reading, Pennsylvania. In 2022, she had three major new productions running in her home city: Clyde’s, a companion play to Sweat; MJ, a Broadway musical about Michael Jackson for which she wrote the book; and Ricky Ian Gordon’s operatic take on Intimate Apparel at Lincoln Center, for which she wrote the libretto.
These plays and the others in her extraordinary canon are the products of deep sensitivity, empathy, and creativity. But part of what makes Nottage’s work so special is the way her plays are informed by the skills and perspectives gained in her time away from theater. Nottage produces documentaries alongside husband Tony Gerber, she has produced for television and film, and she briefly worked part-time as a reporter. For four years after she earned her MFA from Yale, she left theater entirely to work as the national press officer for Amnesty International. In the late 1990s, she took almost seven years away from making theater to focus on raising her young daughter and taking care of her mother. One of her first plays upon her return to theater was Intimate Apparel, inspired by her great-grandmother’s life story. These varied experiences have nourished in her and her work the curiosity and rigor of a journalist, the passion and big-heartedness of a human rights activist, and the care and specificity of a dedicated mother and daughter. All of these facets merge with her extraordinary artistic talent to produce her singular plays.
To create the very specific worlds of each of her plays and the complex humans who inhabit them, Nottage does deep research and often does extensive interviews. While working on Sweat, she spent more than two years traveling back and forth to Reading, Pennsylvania, interviewing residents and immersing herself in the city. Ruined was originally intended to be an adaptation of Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage, but time spent in eastern Africa interviewing refugees — particularly women refugees from the Democratic Republic of the Congo — convinced her that their stories, so often untold, deserved their own original work, unbound by Brecht’s original. Nottage employs all facets of her experience to make highly specific works that speak to us all the more resoundingly because of the empathy and detail woven into them.
But Nottage does not always have to travel to make her work. During her seven-year break from theater, she moved with her husband and daughter back into the Brooklyn brownstone in which she grew up to help care for her ailing mother, and she still lives there today. For all of the exquisitely imagined lives Nottage creates onstage, her work also recognizes the necessity and rituals of home and community — whether it is far from the place one began or under the very same roof.
More great reading: See other recent articles and interviews on the Lantern Searchlight blog
Lantern Theater Company’s production of Crumbs from the Table of Joy by Lynn Nottage is onstage November 9 through December 17, 2023, at St. Stephen’s Theater. Visit our website for tickets and information.
