If anyone in the world was destined for greatness, Lynn Nottage would certainly fall into that category. Born in Brooklyn, New York to a child psychologist and schoolteacher, Nottage attended the prestigious St. Anns School before moving on to world renowned LaGuardia High School of Music and Art then Brown University for undergraduate followed by Yale School of Drama.
Lynn Nottage’s ‘Sweat’ is currently playing on Broadway. (Courtesy photo)
It is almost not surprising then, that she is the recipient of not one but two Pulitzer Prizes. Her latest Pulitzer is for her new drama “Sweat”, currently playing on Broadway. Seemingly almost written expressly in response to current events, it explores the lives of a group of coworkers and friends who lose their jobs at the factory that employs pretty much everyone in the town. The loss of stability and apparent loss of their way of life, brings out the worst in all of them with frightening and tragic consequences.
At the play’s center are three women who all work at the factory together. Nottage, a professor at Columbia University and Yale University, describes the dynamic. “One woman her husband died, one woman is divorced and one woman is separated so they’re in three different phases of their relationships. I was just interested in examining women who really have to forge lives on their own, and carve out their spaces by themselves and not in relationship to men,” Nottage told the AFRO. An intense drama dotted with comedic moments, the friendship between Cynthia and Tracy’s grown sons, who also work at the factory, is also a crucial element.
Intrigued by the ways in which the American economy was slowly metamorphosing and the way that transformation was affecting American life, Nottage set out to write a play that would capture this phenomenon. “It was an interesting journey writing this play because I began writing it in 2011. I spent two years sort of listening to people and talking to people and not quite knowing what I was gonna write about,” she said.
She went to Reading Pennsylvania to meet the people who would breathe life into her characters. Describing Reading she called it “an interesting city because for so many years it had a robust textile industry, steel industry, and on the outskirts, agricultural industry and a lot of immigrants from a variety of places; Latino countries, Dominican Republic, Columbia, and so I thought it was a really interesting story because it told- I feel it tells the story of America.”
A woman getting a play on Broadway is a big enough accomplishment. Nottage is also African-American, so there is an added component of achievement and importance. It’s an unfortunate fact that content written by men sometimes tends to erase Black women. “I think that the more we make strides the less we’ll come up against it. I think that the more our voices are heard, the less they can ignore us. You think of the phenomenal women who are creating art like Shonda Rhimes and Ava DuVernay and Oprah Winfrey. These women are really carving out spaces for Black women and the more of us that you see the less we can be ignored so I think that it’s really important for us to be present. And our presence in numbers really prevents them from stopping us,” she said.
Talent alone though, has never been enough. Asked to what she attributed her own success, she responded with laughter. “It’s being in this business for a very long time. This is a battle of attrition. You have to have the fortitude to sort of cope with rejection because one of the things about this business is that you hear no a lot of the time. It’s about how you respond to no and you stand back up.”
It is also about her ability to write material that is meaningful to a large swath of the theater going public. “A lot of it is having written plays that connect with an audience. Regardless of whether they are critically acclaimed I think that plays that I have written that are successful what they have in common is that audiences lean into them and respond to them and ultimately I think that that’s our goal.”