Meet the Playwright, Part II: The Extraordinary Range of Lynn Nottage
The CRUMBS FROM THE TABLE OF JOY playwright’s works are as varied as their subjects
“Who wants to see the same play again?” Lynn Nottage asked in this 2004 New York Times article. “I certainly don’t want to write the same play again and again.”
The playwright of Crumbs from the Table of Joy — onstage at Lantern Theater Company November 9 through December 17, 2023 — need not worry. Her rich collection of work spans genres, places, times, and themes, making her one of the most celebrated and most varied playwrights of our time.
Nottage writes beautifully in a wide variety of styles; she doesn’t have one kind of story or one way to tell them. Her wide-ranging curiosity leads her to write on an astonishing variety of subjects and themes, and her extraordinary talent enables her to mold the structure, language, and tone as a particular story demands. Nottage writes smart, incisive investigations into human nature, and her stories and the characters peopling them are richly specific. The plays are rooted in their place and time, suffused with authenticity and real human heartbeats. But rather than closing off understanding, this specificity helps the work resonate broadly by showing us the human desires, failings, kindness, disappointment, and resilience that connect us all.
In By the Way, Meet Vera Stark, Nottage wrote about Black actors trying to break into 1930s Hollywood, and told the story as part screwball comedy, part decades-later academic conference. In Mlima’s Tale, Nottage explores the illegal ivory trade in a highly theatricalized way, tasking an actor to play the titular elephant and then to play that elephant’s tusks as they move through the supply chain. Plays like Ruined and Sweat — despite being set continents away from one another — share a richly lived-in quality, born from Nottage’s immersion in their respective worlds through interviews and site visits. True to an artistic nature she has called “restless,” Nottage’s plays go where her imagination takes her, and she adapts her creative tools to the demands of each story.
Nottage’s plays span the globe and history — from a present-day truck stop sandwich shop in Clyde’s to the 17th century French court of Louis XIV in Las Meninas — evoking each new time and place through her deeply humane writing and grounding in research. But one place she returns to frequently is her own home: New York City.
Her first major production after working for Amnesty International was 1995’s Crumbs from the Table of Joy, set in 1950s Brooklyn. Recent widower Godfrey brings his two teenage daughters from their home in Florida to Brooklyn in search of Father Divine — and of comfort in his grief and help in raising his teenagers. That search first leads to Lily, his late wife’s sister, who introduces the spirit of freedom and revolution into Godfrey’s strict house, and then to Gerte, his new wife. A German immigrant who married Godfrey after only knowing him for a few days, Gerte’s arrival in the house opens further conflict. This is a memory play, told with poetry and imagination through the recollections and direct address of Ernestine, the eldest daughter. She narrates us through her experience of finding her own voice and a fulfilling way to live her life amidst revolutionary calls for racial, social, and gender justice.
One of Nottage’s most widely produced plays is 2003’s Intimate Apparel, which was inspired by the life of her great-grandmother. Set in 1905 New York, it follows Esther, a Black woman who sews exquisite corsets and undergarments for ladies across the social and racial spectrum while saving to open her own beauty parlor. She nurses a mutual affection for the Orthodox Jewish man who sells her fabric, but understanding the impossibility of a relationship, she marries a man from Barbados with whom she has been corresponding. After he fritters away her savings, she starts fresh, secure in her own abilities. The play is both lyrical and realistic, deeply grounded in its specifics of time and place and yet widely accessible in its explorations of loneliness, friendship, and self-reliance.
Produced here at the Lantern in 2022, Fabulation, or The Re-Education of Undine is another play set in New York City, this one taking place in the present and through a much different style. Undine begins the play as a high-powered Manhattan PR executive, running her own boutique firm. Over the course of the first scene, she loses everything due to her husband’s fraud: her money, her prestige, and her home. She returns to her family in Brooklyn and embarks on a journey through her past, the criminal justice system, and social services on her way back to her roots. It is one of Nottage’s funniest plays — a quick-paced satire of social striving, presenting stereotypes just to upend them.
One of Nottage’s first full-length plays, Crumbs from the Table of Joy carries in it the seeds that will blossom into Intimate Apparel, Fabulation, and more of Nottage’s later works. Ernestine’s careful sewing of her graduation dress predates Intimate Apparel’s Esther. Ermina’s discomfort with her home life is at the core of Fabulation’s Undine. By the Way, Meet Vera Stark plays with Crumbs from the Table of Joy’s preoccupation with the silver screen. And many of Nottage’s plays have at their heart the question that animates Crumbs from the Table of Joy: how do we make the life we want to live?
Nottage is a truly singular writer, one who can mold her gifts precisely to the work at hand, whether set at home or abroad, then or now, through realism or through flights of poetic imagination. “All my plays are about people who have been marginalized…who have been erased from the public record,” she told The Guardian. With her prodigious gifts, Nottage ensures these people can be heard again, in whatever form their voice wants to take.
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.
