Playwright Lynn Nottage won a Pulitzer Prize yesterday for her play Ruined which tells the story of the women of the Congo whose lives have been “ruined” by systemic rape and torture.
Nottage was inspired by Berthold Brecht’s Mother Courage to tell the story of women who get forgotten once the headlines cease (if there were any headlines to begin with.) If you want to learn more on the topic check out Lisa Jackson’s documentary, The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo.
Here’s what Nottage said to the Daily News about her intensions behind the play: “I hope it will raise awareness about the issues that the play raises. The war ended in 2002, but the conflict and violence against women continues.”
She will share part of her prize (which she probably desperately needs since playwrighting is not very lucrative) with the Panzi Hospital in the Congo which performs reconstructive surgeries on rape survivors.
I can’t say it enough- AWARDS MATTER. The Pulitzers and all awards matter to producers and to theatre goers. It’s much easier to produce a play on a difficult topic lie rape in the Congo if it comes with the words “pulitzer prize winning.” And it will be easier for Nottage to get her next play produced because she won the Pulitzer. That just the facts.
This year, interestingly, a woman was going to be honored in this category. The other finalists were Gina Gionfriddo’s Becky Shaw, Lin-Manuel Miranda and Quiara Alegría Hudes’ In the Heights,(ok the last one was a male-female partnership,but you get the point.)
Laura Collin-Hughes wrote a great piece on why these awards mattered that worth referencing here:
The Pulitzer isn’t important in itself; it matters because of its ripple effect. Quite simply, winners and finalists get noticed. They get produced. The Pulitzer changes the composition of our canon, the stories we as a culture tell ourselves. Women’s voices need to be a much more significant part of that.
And yet most of the time when the lights go down in a theater, we listen to a male playwright — generally a white male playwright — telling a story. Usually, that story is primarily about a man, or men, despite the fact that women are far more likely than men to attend musicals and straight plays.
Take Broadway, for example. A Broadway run — not necessarily a successful run, just a run — is a marker of success that, like a Pulitzer, gets a play produced elsewhere, sometimes all over the world. Broadway is also where the money is in theater, and that’s no small reason artists have it in their sights.
But male writers and composers have a far, far better chance of seeing their names in lights there. Right now on Broadway, an anemic seven out of 37 shows, or 18.9 percent, have female playwrights, book writers, composers or lyricists. One of them is “In the Heights,” with its book by Hudes, who was also a 2007 Pulitzer finalist for her play, “Elliot, a Soldier’s Fugue.”
In fact, the only current Broadway show that’s wholly written by women is “9 to 5,” which has music and lyrics by Dolly Parton and a book by Patricia Resnick. Yes, French hit-maker Yasmina Reza has a new crowd-pleaser in “God of Carnage,” but her translator, Christopher Hampton (whose own Broadway play, “The Philanthropist,” is in previews), is and has been very much a partner in her English-language success.
Off-Broadway isn’t much better for women, as female playwrights pointed out last fall when they banded together in protest of seriously ugly numbers. According to The New York Times, the women argued “that their male counterparts in the 2008-9 season are being produced at 14 of the largest Off Broadway institutions at four times the rate that women are.”
This place where women fill most of the seats, then, is a weirdly blinkered world, its view focused by men. There’s seldom room for plays like “Ruined,” which is largely about the atrocities that happen to women and girls — African women and girls — in wartime. (It’s currently at Manhattan Theatre Club in a production by Kate Whoriskey.) There’s seldom room for plays by women at all. If not for the 2002 Pulitzer, there probably wouldn’t have been much of a welcome on the nation’s stages for Suzan-Lori Parks’ “Topdog/Underdog.” If not for that year’s shortlist, fewer people would have seen Dael Orlandersmith’s “Yellowman” and Rebecca Gilman’s “The Glory of Living.” But high-profile prizes help immensely.
A Pulitzer Shortlist Bursting With Women! (Yes, It Matters.) (ARTicle- the blog of the National Arts Journalism Program)
Brooklyn writer Lynn Nottage wins Pulitzer (NY Daily News)
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This is wonderful, although I have only read Intimate Apparel which she wrote. I will have to find a copy of RUINED.
I am glad that more black female playwrights are getting noticed. first Suzan-Lori Parks, now Lynn Nottage!
ugh, no offense, Melissa, but you shouldn’t have put Rebecca Gilman there in the same group with great writers like Suzan-Lori Parks. This Gilman, she is such a horrible, CRAPPY playwright whose crappy stage plays are so Lifetime-ish. Everyone I know hates her plays. I absolutely LOATHE her and her god-awful plays. she is just like Stephanie Meyers, a crappy writer with no substance.
Ugh. The theatre world deserves a better female playwright than this awful Rebecca Gilman, who only serves to write Lifetime-ish plays. What a travesty.
Thanks for reminding us that these awards DO matter. It’s very prestigious to win a Pulitzer and, as you say, it’s the money shot. I am sick to death of seeing mostly just a white guy’s view of the world in movies, art, and theater–not to mention that most critics seem to be some white guy spouting off. It wouldn’t be so bad if their views weren’t so NARROW–it’s like they are incapable of evaluating anything in a nuanced manner.
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