Lynn Nottage, a visiting lecturer at the School of Drama, has won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for her play “Ruined,” about a group of women who were raped and brutalized during the war in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
The Pulitzer board described the play, which is currently on an extended run at the Manhattan Theatre Club, as “a searing drama set in chaotic Congo that compels audiences to face the horror of wartime rape and brutality while still finding affirmation of life and hope amid hopelessness.”
The Pulitzer Prize carries a $10,000 award.
Nottage, who earned her M.F.A. in playwriting from the School of Drama in 1989, has said her play was inspired by Bertolt Brecht’s “Mother Courage and Her Children.” It focuses on the suffering of the inhabitants of a Congolese brothel owned by a woman named Mama Nadi.
“I wanted to tell the story of these women and the war in the Congo and I couldn’t find anything about them in the newspapers or the library, so I felt I had to get on a plane and go to Africa to find the story myself,” Nottage told The Hartford Courant after winning the prize. “I felt there was a complete absence in the media of their narrative. It’s very different now, but when I went in 2004 that was definitely the case.”
Nottage, who won a MacArthur “Genius” Award in 2007, is the second African-American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, after Suzan-Lori Parks in 2002.
She is also the author of “Intimate Apparel,” which won the 2004 New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play, the Outer Critics Circle Best Play award, the John Gassner Award, the American Theatre Critics/Steinberg 2004 New Play Award and the 2004 Francesca Primus Award. “Intimate Apparel” and Nottage’s Obie Award-wining play “Fabulation, or the Education of Undine” are published in an anthology by Theatre Communications Group (TCF). Another anthology of her works, “Crumbs from the Table of Joy and Other Plays,” was also published by TCF; in addition to the title work, it includes “Las Meninas,” “Mud, River, Stone,” “Por’Knockers” and “Poof!” Her plays have been produced and developed at theaters throughout the country, including the Yale Repertory Theatre.
Nottage has also been honored with the 2004 PEN/Laura Pels Award for literary excellence.
An alumna of New Dramatists, Nottage is a graduate of Brown University, where she began writing plays with Paula Vogel, who won the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and who is now head of the Yale School of Drama’s Playwriting Program. After graduating from the Yale School of Drama, Nottage worked for Amnesty International for four years before turning to full-time writing in 1993. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, filmmaker Tony Gerber, and daughter Ruby. She is a member of the Artists Advisory Board of the New York Foundation for the Arts.
