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" My interest in theatre and storytelling began in my mother's kitchen. It was a meeting place for my mother's large circle of friends. "

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" I'm always hyperaware of the way in which working people are portrayed on the stage. "

" The more you go to a theatre and the more you hear stories you aren't necessarily familiar with, the more open you become. "

" I wonder: Would there be a black president if people hadn't already begun imagining, through film and television, that a black man is president? It's self-actualization. "

" I don't think any of us could predict Trump. Trump is the stuff of nightmares. But in talking to people, I knew there was a tremendous level of disaffection and anger and sorrow. I know people felt misrepresented and voiceless. "

" 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. "

" I was repeatedly told that there isn't an African American woman who can open a show on Broadway. I said, 'Well, how do we know? How do we know if we don't do it?' I said, 'I think you're wrong.' "

" 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. "

" The great thing about 'Vera Stark' is that my research was watching movies, screwball comedies, so I could literally sit back and relax. "

" 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. "

" Each play I write has its own unique origin story. "

" I do see myself as an old-fashioned storyteller. But there's always a touch of the political in my plays. "

" It's very easy, when we're reading those articles on the 20th page of 'The New York Times,' to distance ourselves and say, 'It's someone else.' "

" The people sometimes who are closest to us are the ones who bear the brunt of our frustration. "

" 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. "

" When you begin a play, you're going to have to spend a lot of time with those characters, so those characters are going to have to be rich enough that you want to take a very long journey with them. That's how I begin thinking about what I want to write about and who I want to write about. "

" 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. "

" Silence is complicity. I believe that. "

" Broadway is a closed ecosystem. "

" American audiences very rarely deal with material outside their borders. "

" African American women in particular have incredible buying power. Statistically, we go to the movies more than anyone. We have made Tyler Perry's career. His films open with $25 million almost consistently. "

" Once working people discover that, collectively, we have more power than we do as individual silos, then we become an incredibly powerful force. But I think that there are powers that be that are invested in us remaining divided along racial lines, along economic lines. "

" What I often do when I'm writing, if I can't find that story, I go out and I hunt for it. "

" Women are standing up and leaning forward and asserting their power. "

" My fears about where theater is going - it's the Hollywood model, where people are chasing the almighty dollar and making commercial decisions based on nothing more than generating income for themselves and their theaters. "

" 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. "

" In senior year at college, Paula Vogel was my playwriting teacher; she is the first person to introduce me to the notion that a woman could actually forge a career in the theatre. Up until then, the possibility seemed remote and inaccessible, as I had very few role models who directly touched my life. "

" I'm a contemporary playwright in a postmodern world. "

" I wouldn't say I see my work as having a political ideology. Lynn Nottage certainly has a political ideology. I think that the work is an extension of who I am, but I don't think that when I write the play I'm looking to push the audience one way or another. "

" If the Tony Awards want to remain relevant in the American theater conversation, then they need to embrace the true diversity of voices that populate the American theater. "

" There were not a lot of women in the theater department - it was really run by men, and so the message was that women can be onstage, but women can't really be backstage. "