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" I knew that there was a great deal of depth and life that was sitting just beyond my mother's gaze. "
Lynn Nottage
Life
Sitting
Mother
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" I love Twitter. "
Lynn Nottage
I Love
Love
Twitter
" All of my plays are about people who have been marginalized... erased from the public record. "
Lynn Nottage
People
Public
Who
" Plays are getting smaller and smaller, not because playwrights minds are shrinking but because of the economics. "
Lynn Nottage
Getting
Minds
Economics
" I feel like 'Sweat' arrived on Broadway at the moment that it needed to. I feel like a commercial audience was not prepared for 'Ruined' or 'Intimate Apparel' for many different reasons. "
Lynn Nottage
Moment
Broadway
Sweat
" Silence is complicity. I believe that. "
Lynn Nottage
Believe
Silence
I Believe
" My parents are avid consumers of art, collectors of African American paintings, and have always gone to the theater. My mother has always been an activist, too. As long as I can remember, we were marching in lines. "
Lynn Nottage
American
Remember
Parents
" For me, playwriting is sharing my experiences, telling my stories. "
Lynn Nottage
Experiences
Sharing
Me
" We need to diversify the people who are backstage and producing and marketing these shows. It's the limitations of these people that are holding Broadway back. "
Lynn Nottage
Back
Broadway
Marketing
" I can't quite remember the exact moment when I became obsessed with writing a play about the seemingly endless war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, but I knew that I wanted to somehow tell the stories of the Congolese women caught in the cross-fire. "
Lynn Nottage
Women
Remember
War
" I am a Tony voter; it is an honor that I take seriously. Each season, I enter the process with a degree of enthusiasm and optimism, which dissipates as I slowly plow through show after show. "
Lynn Nottage
Season
Honor
I Am
" If you lead with the anger, it will turn off the audience. And what I want is the audience to engage with the material and to listen and then to ask questions. I think that 'Ruined' was very successful at doing that. "
Lynn Nottage
Questions
Anger
Doing
" I need a release from whatever I'm writing. "
Lynn Nottage
Need
Release
Whatever
" In listening to the narratives of the Congolese, I came to terms with the extent to which their bodies had become battlefields. "
Lynn Nottage
Had
Listening
Which
" It's much easier to conjure characters strictly from your imagination than to have to think about whether you're representing people in a truthful way. "
Lynn Nottage
Imagination
Think
People
" I always thought of my mother as a warrior woman, and I became interested in pursuing stories of women who invent lives in order to survive. "
Lynn Nottage
Mother
Warrior
Woman
" Ultimately, we're incredibly resilient creatures. People really do get on with the business of living. "
Lynn Nottage
Living
Business
Creatures
" People probably have different philosophies about this, but I think that when you're first shaping the play and trying to find a character, the initial actors that develop it end up imprinting on it - you hear their voices; you hear their rhythms. You can't help but to begin to write toward them during the rehearsal process. "
Lynn Nottage
End
Think
You
" If you're looking at the people who head the institutions, there are very few African Americans or people of colour. I'm talking about the major theatres that position themselves as serving all audiences. What you find is, by and large, people who are shaping what we see, and the people who are the tastemakers are white. "
Lynn Nottage
Looking
White
You
" As a woman of color, slowly and with some coercing, the not-for-profit theaters around the country are beginning to recognize and embrace the power of our stories, but with regards to Broadway and other commercial venues, we remain very much marginalized and excluded from that larger creative conversation. "
Lynn Nottage
Beginning
Woman
Power
" Before I start, I create a set list that I listen to while I'm writing. For 'Intimate Apparel,' I loaded Erik Satie, Scott Joplin, klezmer music, and the American jazz performer and composer Reginald Robinson. "
Lynn Nottage
Start
Writing
Music
" I'm always hyperaware of the way in which working people are portrayed on the stage. "
Lynn Nottage
People
Stage
Way
" Like Alice Walker and Toni Morrison, I try to balance reality with how we'd like the world to be. "
Lynn Nottage
Balance
How
World
" Broadway's never my end goal because of the plays I write. These are tough plays. Of course there's a lot of humor, but my goal is just to reach as wide an audience as possible, however that happens. "
Lynn Nottage
Audience
Reach
Humor
" In many ways, I consider those to be my formative years, because when you're in school, you have a distant relationship to the world in that most of what you're learning is from books and lectures. But at Amnesty, I came face to face with realities in a very direct and harsh way. "
Lynn Nottage
School
World
Relationship
" The essence of creativity is to look beyond where you can actually see. I don't want to dwell in same place too long. "
Lynn Nottage
Long
You
Want
" The people sometimes who are closest to us are the ones who bear the brunt of our frustration. "
Lynn Nottage
Bear
Us
Sometimes
" We use metaphors to express our own truths. "
Lynn Nottage
Own
Express
Metaphors
" I'm a contemporary playwright in a postmodern world. "
Lynn Nottage
Playwright
Contemporary
World
" It's incumbent on us to reach beyond the confines of the institutions that traditionally produce art and find new ways to get it to the people. "
Lynn Nottage
Art
Beyond
Find
" What I often do when I'm writing, if I can't find that story, I go out and I hunt for it. "
Lynn Nottage
Find
Go
Hunt