Pulitzer-winning playwright Lynn Nottage is heading to Broadway. As Deadline reports, her play “Sweat” will transfer to Studio 54 in March after a successful run at The Public Theater. The play was commissioned by and previously ran at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and Washington’s Arena Stage. The play is directed by Kate Whoriskey. Its sold-out run at the Public will close on December 18.
The play couldn’t be more timely, as small-town issues were a heated topic throughout the recent election. The story is, as Deadline writes, “set in bar in a Pennsylvania factory town where jobs, livelihoods, and friendships have inexorably disappeared in a faltering economy where manufacturing is shifting from the U.S. to countries providing cheaper labor, especially in the wake of North American Free Trade Agreement. Nottage and her frequent collaborator Whoriskey put human faces on people who ‘have seen their retirement funds decimated, their wages decreased while their hours are increased and conditions grow from tolerable to squalid.’”
Nottage’s other plays include “By The Way,” “Meet Vera Stark” (Lilly Award, Drama Desk Nomination), “Ruined” (Pulitzer Prize, OBIE, Lucille Lortel, New York Drama Critics’ Circle, Audelco, Drama Desk, and Outer Critics Circle Award), “Intimate Apparel” (American Theatre Critics and New York Drama Critics’ Circle Awards for Best Play), “Fabulation, or The Re-Education of Undine” (OBIE Award), “Crumbs from the Table of Joy,” “Las Meninas,” “Mud, River, Stone,” “Por’knockers,” and “POOF!”
Nottage is working with composer Ricky Ian Gordon on adapting “Intimate Apparel” into an opera for The Met/Lincoln Center Theater.
Back in October, Women and Hollywood reported on the first-announced female-written Broadway play of the current season. Paula Vogel, another Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, is set to make her Broadway debut with “Indecent,” which will be staged on Broadway next spring.
Nottage joins Vogel as “one of only a few women playwrights making appearances during this Broadway season; others include Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Sara Wordsworth, who co-wrote ‘In Transit’ with James Allen-Ford and Russ Kaplan; Irene Sankoff, who co-wrote ‘Come From Away’ with David Hein; and Lillian Hellman, whose ‘The Little Foxes’ opens in April.”
Also in the works is a musical adaptation of the French film “Amelie,” which will hit Broadway in April, 2017 with “Hamilton’s” Phillipa Soo in the lead role.
