Featuring: NYFA Hall of Fame Honoree Lynn Nottage
Nottage will be honored at our Hall of Fame Benefit on April 4, 2017
Lynn Nottage (Fellow in Playwriting/Screenwriting ‘94 & ‘00) is an
award-winning playwright and screenwriter whose plays have been produced widely
and throughout the world. Her playwriting credits include By the Way, Meet Vera Stark; Ruined; and Intimate Apparel.
Her latest play, Sweat,
will open on March 26, 2017 on Broadway after a sold-out run at The Public Theater
and wide critical praise. The play, which some see as a timely reflection of
America’s current political state, is based on extensive interviews conducted
with blue-collar people in the factory town of Reading, PA, whose livelihoods
have been affected by the decline in American manufacturing.
Sweat has been featured by several publications in the lead-up to its Broadway premiere. It was recently named one of the “5 Must-See Shows if You’re in New York This Month” by The New York Times, and was the focus of a New Yorker article titled “The First Theatrical Landmark of the Trump Era.” The article appears in the March 27, 2017 issue and details the origins of Sweat, Nottage’s career path in playwriting, and how the stories of one small town came to portray “the America that came undone.” MarketWatch also recently spoke with Nottage about the timing of Sweat, why she chose Reading, PA as the play’s setting, and the real-life economic shifts in American life that inspired the work.
Nottage was
recognized with a Pulitzer Prize for Drama for Ruined and is a past recipient of the MacArthur ‘Genius Award’ and Guggenheim Fellowship among
many other honors. She is Co-Founder of the production company Market Road
Films and is an Associate Professor in the Theater Department at Columbia
University School of the Arts. Over the years, she has developed original projects for HBO, Sidney Kimmel Entertainment, Showtime, This is Than, and Harpo. Nottage is writer/producer on the upcoming Netflix Series “She’s Gotta Have It,” directed by Spike Lee (Fellow in Film ‘85).
Her fellow honorees are NYFA affiliated artists Christopher d’Amboise (Fellow in Choreography ‘89), Ida Applebroog (Fellow in Graphics ‘86, Painting ‘90), and Patron of the Arts Peggy Cooper Cafritz. Find out more about NYFA’s Hall of Fame Benefit by clicking here.
Image: Courtesy Lynn Nottage
