Nottage, Lynn (1964-…), an American playwright, became the first woman to win two Pulitzer Prizes for drama. Nottage won the prize in 2009 for Ruined (2008) and in 2017 for Sweat (2015). Nottage sets her plays in a variety of times and places, but several of her works explore the experiences of African American women.
In Ruined, Nottage portrays how African women struggle for survival during a brutal civil war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The play is set in a bar near a mining town where women must resort to prostitution to support themselves. Nottage set Sweat in the industrial city of Reading, Pennsylvania, in 2000 and 2008. The play examines the tensions among unionized factory workers, some African American and some white, as they face the possibility of losing their jobs.
Nottage first gained widespread recognition after she won the New York Drama Critics’ Award for Intimate Apparel (2003). The play is set in New York City in 1905, and the main character is partly inspired by Nottage’s great-grandmother. It portrays the life of a lonely young Black seamstress named Esther who makes ladies’ underwear and hopes to escape her humble financial circumstances. Nottage’s next play, Fabulation, or the Re-education of Undine (2004), is a companion piece to Intimate Apparel. It explores a related theme of the dangers of economic ambition. By the Way, Meet Vera Stark (2011) explores racial and gender stereotypes that limited the careers of Black actresses in Hollywood from the 1930’s to the present. The three plays reflect the shifts in identity for African American women at the start, midpoint, and end of the 1900’s. A chamber opera version of Intimate Apparel, with its libretto (text) written by Nottage and a score by American composer Ricky Ian Gordon, premiered in 2022.
Nottage’s first play was Poof! (1993), a bizarre one-act comedy about a woman whose abusive husband spontaneously bursts into flames after she asks for divine intervention. She returns to the theme of unhappy marriages in the comedy Las Meninas (2002), set in France in the 1600’s. Crumbs from the Table of Joy (1995) features an African American family who moves from Florida to New York City in the 1950’s. Mud, River, Stone (1996) follows a middle-class African American couple vacationing at a hotel in Mozambique who are taken hostage by an angry bellhop who wants a solution to the poverty and hunger of his people. Nottage’s other plays include Por’knockers (1995) and Mlima (2018). Clyde’s (2021) revolves around workers at a diner who are rebuilding their lives after having been in prison. Nottage also wrote MJ the Musical (2022), about the life and music of the American singer Michael Jackson.
Nottage was born on Nov. 2, 1964, in Brooklyn, a borough of New York City. She received a B.A. degree from Brown University in 1986 and an M.F.A. degree in playwriting from the Yale School of Drama in 1989. She is currently a professor in the Theatre Department at Columbia University.
