A biography for Lynn Nottagehasn’t been written yet.
“I do see myself as an old-fashioned storyteller. But there's always a touch of the political in my plays.”
“I love Twitter.”
“I'm a schizophrenic writer.”
“Saying, 'I'm going to create jobs' is great, but before you create jobs, something has to be offered to alleviate some of the suffering now.”
“When you're fighting for an increasingly smaller portion of the pie, you turn against each other; you create reasons to hate each other.”
“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.”
“Women are standing up and leaning forward and asserting their power.”
“There is an enduring feeling that women can write domestic dramas but don't have the muscularity or the vision to write state-of-the-nation narratives.”
“Even in Congo, where conflicts are happening, people have births, weddings, deaths, and celebrations.”
“I know what I'm trying to say, so I'm always open to learning how to say it.”
“American audiences very rarely deal with material outside their borders.”
“I wrote 'Ruined' and 'Vera Stark' at the same time. That's just how my brain functions - when I'm dwelling someplace very heavy, I need a release.”
“I see procrastination and research as part of my artistic process.”
“I'm interested in people who are dwelling outside the mainstream. And very often, those people happen to be woman of color.”
“The more you go to a theatre and the more you hear stories you aren't necessarily familiar with, the more open you become.”
“The person whose work introduced me to the craft was Lorraine Hansberry. The person who taught me to love the craft was Tennessee Williams. The person who really taught me the power of the craft was August Wilson, and the person who taught me the political heft of the craft was Arthur Miller.”
“In listening to the narratives of the Congolese, I came to terms with the extent to which their bodies had become battlefields.”
“What I often do when I'm writing, if I can't find that story, I go out and I hunt for it.”
“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 remains an incredible struggle for women in theater, and, in particular, playwrights and directors, to get their work seen and to not only get seen, but to get it to Broadway.”