Ruined
playwright Lynn Nottage on women, inspiration and the possibility of Africa
2008-11-21
By Sergio Mims

Brooklyn born and raised, award winning playwright Lynn Nottage, in just a few short years, has become one of the most acclaimed and accomplished writers for the stage. With her multiple award winning 2004 play Intimate Apparel, she became one of our most important voices,  quickly following that triumph with Fabulation, Crumbs from the Table of Joy and now her latest, the anxiously anticipated Ruined. Set in
war-torn Congo, Ruined tells the story of the devastating effect the conflict has on a group of women caught in the madness. EbonyJet.com had an opportunity to talk to Ms. Nottage while Ruined was still in rehearsals.

EBONYJET.COM: You’ve talked in the past about how the conversations you heard as a child among the women in your family and from your Brooklyn neighborhood inspired you to become a writer, but why stage plays instead of novels or poetry? What is it about the stage that drew you to it?

NOTTAGE: Well it’s interesting because I think that sitting around a table hearing people speak for so long… the table was the center of my family’s life.  My mother was a schoolteacher and she would get home by 3 o’ clock in the afternoon and by 3:30, 4 o’clock the table would be surrounded by all these women and they spoke in dialogue. What I heard was conversation. So the way I think creatively is in dialogue, is in conversation. I may not necessarily have the strongest visual sensibility, which is why I don’t write screenplays, but I don’t see things in celluloid or in pictures. I hear them speaking to me. So I think that’s why I choose this particular medium.

Another reason why I write for the theater is because it’s dynamic. And so that means that every night it changes, depending on who’s sitting in the audience, depending on how the actors relate to one another, so my story continues to grow and evolve over the course of a production in a way that it doesn’t when you have a one-on-one relationship with a novel or the way that an audience has a relationship with a film because no matter how they respond that celluloid is not going to shift or change with their emotions. That’s why I love the theater in particular.

What is it about a particular story or idea that moves you to write a play about it? Judging from your past works is it usually a story involving a strong black woman?
I find my way to a story by what compels me, and usually what compels me is a strong black female. (laughs) So by default my characters turn out to be strong black females because that’s how, you know, I see the world. Because those are the women who engaged me, who raised me, so those are the characters that I am compelled by.

I don’t know what pulls me into a story, but I know it’s time to write a story when I can’t get it out of my head. I have many, many different ideas, but it’s that one idea that keeps coming back and nagging me:  “Write me down, write me down, write me down.” That’s when I finally know it’s time for me to commit that story to the page.

And that was the case for your new play Ruined?
Well the case with Ruined is slightly different because it began with me wanting to engage with the war. We were at war in Iraq and there was this devastating conflict that was going on in the Congo, and I felt that we as Americans were being incredibly complacent and that there was a great deal of suffering in the world to which we had very little response. And in particular as artists we had very little response to it. So I was reading the headlines about the Congo and I was getting angrier and angrier because it just warranted these little boxes relegated to page 28 as a sidebar. This conflict is the deadliest conflict in the world since World War II. More people have died and this conflict is ongoing. So I wanted to engage this war at some level.

What do you hope that people get from your work?
Well in the case of Ruined, I hope that when people read about the Congo, they would put faces to the victims or be compelled to make a donation to an organization  or to call their congressmen or representative and say something. With this play I want people to be engaged with the issue.

You like the idea of doing works that are challenging to the audience. You don’t like to play it safe.
I don’t. I would describe myself as having “the danger gene” (laughs). You know there are people who would safely gaze off a cliff? Well I like to go straight to the edge and look down and see what’s down there (laughs). I mean life is too short…

Which brings up the question of how much research do you do for a play?
Well it depends on the play. In the case of Fabulation I didn’t do any research, I just wrote it. For Intimate Apparel, which is set in New York the turn of the 20th century, I didn’t know that much about New York at that period so I spent a great deal of time at the New York Public Library pouring over archives and images. Or with Crumbs From the Table of Joy I didn’t grow up during the 1950’s. In the case of that play I sat down with my mother who grew up in Bed-Sty Brooklyn and asked her what was it like growing up then and what she listened to as a teenager and interestingly enough…

...Ebony magazine for archival research because at the time there were few very images back then in the media of black folks, particularly middle class. (laughs) I mean absolutely 100% true! Ebony is a great research source and has remained so for me.  But I’ll tell you one of the great things about using Ebony as a source is because they show you home life, so you go into people’s homes and see where they were sitting and get little glimpses of life and they were the only magazine doing this.

What do you say in response to some who says that serious black artists such as yourself deal mainly with downbeat or depressing subject matters?
I don’t think that that’s necessarily true, especially for myself. I mean I move between tragedy and comedy naturally because that’s life.

My husband has this quote that I love: “An artist moves between grandiosity and despair.”  And I also think that it’s our role as artists to keep our eyes open. I feel that I have a moral responsibility to respect the world that I live in and the world that I live in is sometimes quite wonderful, exciting and fun but more often than not lately there’s a lot of tragedy that I see and I don’t think that it’s my responsibility just to entertain. I think that have to somehow engage with the difficult issues. And particularly in theater where I think we that we can have that type of conversation.

Do you believe that the stage offers more opportunities for a more honest exploration of black life, culture and history than other forms of media such as the movies or television?
Yes, yes, I do! I think in particular with television and film you have so many gods that you have to serve. You have your sponsors, you have your ratings, you have the networks. You have so many people who are telling you what you have to do and it’s really all about the bottom line in a way that not-for-profit theater isn’t.

Being a serious playwright I have to ask you what’s your opinion about Tyler Perry? Some say he’s done good things bringing more black people to experience the theater, but others say he’s demeaned the long history of black theater with stereotyped characters.
Well I am of two minds. Bringing non-theater going people to see theater I think is terrific, but I wish that he was nurturing a theater audience willing to engage in all types of theater which I don’t think is the case.

I saw some of his early stage work and I did find it interesting that it reminded me of the type of work that was done at the turn of the century during vaudeville, where you had all of these elements. You have a song, and you have those stock characters and it’s familiar and easy and you don’t have to be engaged on a certain level and there is absolutely a place for that. 

But I’m not one of these artists who get down on other people because I like to replace judgment with curiosity and I’m curious as to why audiences respond to his work. I think that he must be doing something that speaks to the folks that go and see it, and I don’t think we can ignore that.

Finally, I have to ask you what are your thoughts about our new President -Elect?
Well I hate to use this language because it’s such Republican language, but I hope that Obama will have a “trickle down” effect on the African American community. (laughs)

I was in Kenya a week before we started rehearsals on Ruined and I was doing workshops at the university there and in Tanzania with students, academics and writers and all everybody wanted to talk about was Obama. And their feeling, and I feel this very strongly, is that  Africa is on the verge of a great artistic and intellectual renaissance and that with Obama as a figurehead for the world -- that’s how they feel, he’s not just the president of the United States, he is a great African figurehead --  that the continent will finally be given its rightful due.

And I think that if Africa is finally allowed to emerge intellectually, there will be an impact on African Americans in this country. So much of our focus is on the tragedy of Africa and not on the possibilities. When I was there all I saw were incredible possibilities and I think that their interest in Obama represents that for Africa and African Americans. I remain very optimistic.

Ruined is currently having its world premiere at the Goodman Theater in Chicago .The play will next be seen at the Manhattan Theater Club in New York starting January 21 through March.