Lynn Nottage Wins Second Pulitzer for Play Sweat: A Timely Meditation on the Working Class

Brooklyn born Lynn Nottage didn’t originally set out to be a playwright when she started college. Though she had always written short stories and plays as a child and attended LaGuardia High School of Music and Art, she veered from this path when she got to prestigious Brown University. She says, “I was pre-med but I can’t say I ever aspired to be a doctor. I was there primarily because I had an aptitude for math and science and I was tracked that way.” Fortunately for us, she came to her senses and ended up studying theater at Brown and then went on to Yale School of Drama. She is now a two-time Pulitzer Prize winning playwright, having just recently receiving the honor for the second time in early April for Sweat her play currently on Broadway.

The playwright, who fondly recalls spending summers on the Caribbean island of the Barbados, where her maternal grandmother is from, is only one of two women with plays on Broadway at the moment. It is an unfortunate situation that is all too common. She credits a female producer being involved with the process as having much to do with it. “One of our lead producers is Louise Gund who is a woman and I think that is also one of the reasons that this happened. The other play has two women who are producing that play. You know and I think that is true on Broadway. A lot of African American shows that reach Broadway are produced by Stephen Byrd and Alia Jones or they have Ron Simons. I think that for our shows to get there we have to begin stepping up as producers and we have to stop waiting for the invitation.” To her credit, the play’s other producer Stuart Thompson, simply fell in love with it from the beginning. “It was running in Oregon and very early on my agent sent a copy of the script to a producer who fell in love with it and he came on board from the very beginning. He’s a commercial producer and he said I don’t know what journey this play is on but I want to be involved. He nurtured and followed it from its inception which is somewhat unusual. He knew the subject matter and he just felt very connected to the story.”

Sweat follows a group of factory workers who are also friends, in a small declining industrial town in Pennsylvania at the beginning of the millennium as they are locked out of their manufacturing job because of labor issues and with no other viable prospects for work. It traces the harmful effects the turn of events have on their personal relationships as well as on the town. Most of the play is set in the town’s favorite watering hole and features some interesting music by the likes of Carlos Santana and Mary J. Blige. Nottage reveals “Before I write a play I always create a soundtrack of the play to give me a sense of what the musical tapestry and landscape is and when I'm writing I just listen to it because it puts me in the mood. Some of the music is music that I was listening to but a lot of that music we weren’t able to get the rights to so a lot of the music you hear is very similar in tone and the diversity of it to the soundtrack that I created while working on the play.”

Nottage, who will be appearing at Harlem’s Schomburg Center for its Theater Talks series on May 1st, began working on Sweat in 2011. She says she chose the subject matter because, “There was in interest in understanding how economic downturn, economic stagnation, deindustrialization was reshaping our American narrative and wanting to go to a city that I felt was very representative of what was happening throughout the country. I landed upon Reading Pennsylvania.” She traveled there a number of times to conduct research. “When I first encountered the city I was surprised by its physical beauty. Its architecture is quite lovely. It’s like a town that’s really full of life and I was surprised at how really impoverished it was and the poverty is really hidden. You don’t see it upon first entering the town but once you’re there you can feel the sadness and feel the absence.” She also made a connection that eventually gave her pause. She explains that she became acquainted with one of the town’s residents. “He is someone we spent a lot of time with who was really interesting and it’s only, I mean almost a year, when it got warm and he was wearing shorts that we saw that he had white supremacist tattoos and that came as a shock and it really forced us to rethink our relationship.”

#theater