Crumbs From the Table of Joy

Born in New York City in 1964 and raised in Brooklyn, Lynn Nottage grew up in the same world as her protagonist, Ernestine Crump, but the similarities largely end there. Her parents were educated, and her mother, Ruby Nottage, worked as a teacher and principal. Her father, Wally Nottage, was a psychologist. The Nottages were also highly involved with the Civil Rights movement, and Nottage’s mother used her expertise as an educator to create and teach at a school where students were taught about Black American and African culture and history. Nottage was educated in the performing arts and artistic expression through exposure to cultural events, and the family’s theater attendance had the most significant effect on her life and career. She began writing plays at the age of eight, and she was selected along with only three other high schoolers to attend a workshop taught by legendary musical theater composer Stephen Sondheim. Although she was undeniably talented at writing for the theater, when she was awarded a scholarship to Brown University, she enrolled in the pre-med program, considering playwriting as more of a hobby. However, her talent and passion pulled her away from her plan to become a physician, and she ultimately graduated from Brown with a dual degree in English and African American studies. She went on to complete an MFA at Yale’s School of Drama. While continuing to write plays in her free time, Nottage spent four years working for Amnesty International in New York City.

Nottage engaged in painstaking dramaturgical research to ground her characters’ worlds in realism, even as some of the theatrical conventions within those worlds are anti-realism. For instance, in Crumbs, her rendition of Brooklyn demonstrates an intricate and personal understanding of the social strata and racial hierarchies of a predominantly white and Jewish neighborhood. However, the protagonist breaks the fourth wall and speaks to the audience, sliding between different ages and blurring time. The structure and conventions of the play are distorted by the inherent fallibility and subjectivity of memory. This is highlighted when Ernestine interjects her own fantasies, which the characters perform as if they are real memories, underlining the artistic blurring between truth and imagination.

For Nottage’s 2008 play Ruined, which is about Congolese women in the civil war–torn Democratic Republic of the Congo (called Zaire at the time) during the 1990s and early 2000s. Nottage traveled to Uganda in 2004, using her contacts and experiences from Amnesty International to speak with women who fled the Congo. These women had endured severe violence such as rape, sexual assault, genital mutilation, maiming, and other atrocities as acts of war—not against the women themselves but as insults to the men who were fighting. This research created fidelity in her representation of the environment and serious social issues underneath the play’s fiction.

Sweat (2015), which earned Nottage her second Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2017, made her the first woman to win this honor twice and was Nottage’s Broadway debut. For Sweat, Nottage conducted even more extensive ground-level research. She went to Reading, Pennsylvania, a town that was devastated by the removal of local manufacturing plants and jobs to Mexico with the enaction of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Nottage spent a year and a half conducting research and interviews before she penned the play. Describing her approach to turning reality into performance to her interviewees, she explains: “I’m not a human rights activist, I’m not a lawyer, I’m not a journalist. But what I can do that many of them won’t do is that I can listen to your story from beginning to end and I’ll do it with patience and I’ll do it with compassion” (“Lynn Nottage on Perseverance.” Academy of Achievement).