African-American Leaders: Lynn Nottage, Playwright

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The female characters created by playwright Lynn Nottage populate a vast expanse in terms of social class, time and place: a teenager in the 1950s, a pretentious businesswoman, a New York seamstress in the early 1900s, women brutalized during the war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). When Nottage received a MacArthur “genius” grant in 2007, she was hailed as “an original voice in American theater.” At the time, her best-known play was Intimate Apparel, an exploration of race and class in America. Just two years later, a very different play by Nottage won the Pulitzer Prize for drama: Ruined, set in a brothel in the war-ravaged DRC.

The Pulitzer board praised Ruined as “a searing drama” that “compels audiences to face the horror of wartime rape and brutality while still finding affirmation of life amid hopelessness.” During her research for Ruined, Nottage interviewed Congolese women who had been victims of violence. “I thought I was going to find broken women, but I found women who had been brutalized but were determined to move on,” Nottage said. She donated part of her $10,000 Pulitzer Prize award to the Panzi Hospital in the DRC, which does reconstructive surgery for women.

By the Way, Meet Vera Stark is her latest play. A humorous look at racial stereotypes in Hollywood, it tells the fictional history of an aspiring African-American actress who works as a maid for a white actress in the 1930s. The main character was inspired by the black actresses of the era who were cast mostly as maids, slaves or children’s nannies.

Born in Brooklyn in 1964, Nottage attended Brown University and the Yale School of Drama.