Conjurer of Worlds

From richly imagined epochs to unsparing satires, Lynn Nottage's roving imagination channels history's discards into drama

by Randy Gener

Lynn Nottage crossed the goat-filled countryside of Senegal and Gambia with her butt suspended in midair. It was her first journey to Africa; in the company of her husband, filmmaker Tony Gerber, she was crammed with other passengers inside a minibus rushing through the region's infernal traffic. "It was a hideous bus ride," she recalls, laughingly. "For 10 hours my ass did not touch the plastic-covered seat."

The secondhand Renault she was in, a staple of public transportation in Senegal, is popularly called a car rapide, which is dismaying and ironical since it is neither a car nor especially rapid; like the tap-taps of Haiti, these privately owned vans have been known to tip over, especially on the bush and savannah roads where they are typically piled high with luggage strapped to the roof. They might swerve madly to avoid a pothole in the road or stop unexpectedly to pick up another passenger. The apprenti, the guy hanging out the back of the vehicle, garbage-man style, keeps calling out: "Yes, come on. Get in."

"No matter how crowded the van got there was always room for one more person," Nottage says.

On the day she describes, however, her culturally constructed ideas of personal space weren't the only things that were challenged en route. "A woman was traveling with her five children," says Nottage, herself a mother of a seven-year-old. "I expected her children to be rowdy and noisy, like American kids, but they were very quiet and polite—stone silence." Then one of the kids in the tightly packed van began to throw up. Nottage was gripped by panic and disgust. "I have to get out of here, I told myself," she remembers. "The bus did not stop. Everyone in the bus cupped their hands and passed the vomit along toward a window."

Nottage thought she was going to become ill, but, strangely, what she took away from that gruesome experience was a kind of revelation: "In that moment everyone in the bus became the parent," she explains. "It was grotesque and uncomfortable, but everyone was willing to help this sick boy. I found that phenomenal. I can't imagine that existing here in America." In that minibus, Nottage literally saw "the communal spirit of Africans" at work, as opposed to the American individualism that decrees it's every man for himself. "There are real ideals to be taken from African culture," she posits. "You do discover in Africa that there is more American in you than you thought existed."

Or, perhaps, more than you care to admit.

Going to Africa for three weeks was one of the seminal experiences in the 40-year-old playwright's life. If you've never been, some of the crazy stories Nottage can tell you about that beautiful, complicated, turbulent, messy, verdant, tenacious continent will likely suffer in the telling. Her mother and grandmother, who made several trips to Kenya and other parts of Africa, had a powerful emotional and spiritual connection to the continent, and it lived in her imagination from the time she was two years old, although it took her until she was in her mid-thirties to get there. While her fascination for Africa remains undimmed ("It is home," she says. "You have this distant love for something. You meet it, and it exceeds your expectations"), her romantic notions of embracing the motherland are nevertheless tinged with firsthand knowledge of the sheer brutal reality of its history and politics, its civil wars and cycles of poverty, the powerful legacy of colonialism—as well as the aggressive human-rights abuses she studied while working for four years, straight out of Yale Drama School, as a press officer for Amnesty International.

"The issues that were prevalent when I left Amnesty International were the ethnic killings between Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda," she says. "You couldn't get anyone to pay attention. Reporters were like, 'Where's Burundi?' Many people gave lip service. That's devastating when you're shouting and you're seeing these images from the field of bloated bodies floating down the rivers. I had a lot of anger and frustration—feelings of helplessness and hopelessness."

This past summer the Brooklyn-based playwright traveled with her husband, her daughter, Ruby, and her father, Wallace, to Kenya and Uganda for a little over a month. She'd been there in the summer of 2004, with director Kate Whoriskey, in search of a play about the lives of refugee women and girls from Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, all victims of war, rape and torture at the hands of armed forces [read her account in American Theatre, May/June '05]. Now, in 2005, she was planning to visit the all-female Kenyan village of Umoja. Founded 10 years ago by homeless women who had been abandoned by their husbands because they had been raped and thus shamed the community, Umoja (meaning "unity" in Swahili) has since prospered into a sanctuary for young women escaping violence, female genital mutilation and forced marriage.

"I'm trying to find a human way of dramatizing these women's experiences that will provoke thought," Nottage says. "The stories of these refugee women running away from rape and domestic abuse are so graphic, so heart-wrenching, that it will be difficult for people to spend two hours hearing them. It was emotionally difficult for me to hear when I interviewed over 15 women in Kampala." This work-in-progress, which she refers to as "my Africa play," is likely to be called Ruined. In it, she says, she will be careful to draw a line between reality and fiction: "Even though I am passionate about the subject, the play won't be testimonals from these women. They told me their stories—they didn't give me their stories—and they are sacred. I know the story I want to tell."

In her plays, as in her life, Lynn Nottage is an intrepid traveler. With a keenly perceptive eye and an unerring ear for dialogue, as well as a healthy appreciation for the unusual, the absurd and the hilariously ironic, she will go anywhere and try just about anything to make the theatrical experience full and rewarding. She is addicted to excursions and research, which she blames, in part, for her being so unprolific: The ground on which her numinous reputation stands consists of only six full-length creations and a memorable one-act, Poof! "I see writers who get produced constantly," she says. "They churn out plays year after year. I'm in awe of them. I'm the absolute opposite. I overindulge myself when it comes to research, because for me that's part of the joy of writing the play. Take the one I'm working on right now: This is my second trip to Africa, okay? Is that necessary? Would most playwrights go to this extreme to write a play?"

You never know exactly where the immersions will take Nottage's original mind next. One moment she's routing around in the Brooklyn of the Cold War 1950s (Crumbs from the Table of Joy), and in the next she's stuck in a hostage situation controlled by demobilized guerillas in a remote village in Mozambique (Mud, River, Stone). If she's not cavorting in hidden corners with court painters and ladies-in-waiting of the French court of Louis XIV (Las Meninas), she's locked herself inside an East New York apartment with a gang of terrorists who blow up an FBI building (Por'knockers). Often her plays pull a bait-and-switch. Possessed by a mischievous wit that she inherited from the maternal side of her family, Nottage lures you into settling in for a comic ride and then jars it with an unexpected shift in emotional tone or fantasy elements that seem to come out of left field. Mud, River, Stone, to pick one example, starts out as a fish-out-of-water satire about a middle-class African-American husband and wife who lose their way somewhere in Africa and land in a wilderness hotel—until harsh reality sets in and they are held at gunpoint, along with a United Nations representative, by a crazed ex-soldier bellhop. Says Seret Scott, a longtime friend who has directed most of Nottage's early plays: "It's almost like a sports event where you're having a great time and, all of a sudden, you hear a sickening, deafening sound, and you know somebody broke a leg. It stops you cold. You ask, 'But when did it stop being funny?' As a director I ask, 'Was it always serious all along?'" (And the wonder of it is that Nottage wrote Mud, River, Stone before she ever set foot in Africa.)

Even Crumbs from the Table of Joy, ostensibly a memory play about a teenage girl and her displaced southern family in post-World War II Brooklyn, disorients. Shot through with heavy political talk, including an allegorical disquisition on black separatism versus assimilation and sharp critiques of puritanical Christianity, this coming-of-age tale momentarily swerves when the father marries a German woman who may have survived the concentration camps. (When Daddy tells the outraged girls to calm down and take a seat, one of them retorts: "Why? She won't be white if we sit down?") Nottage's subversion tactics are not a deliberate strategy. "It's just the way my imagination works," she suggests. "It's like where you choose to sit when you get on the bus. Some like to sit safely next to the driver. Some like to sit far back. I don't always want to go into the familiar, easy place. I prefer to take the long, slow road, so I can do a lot of sightseeing. I enjoy that very difficult bus ride, with my ass suspended in the air, squeezed between lots of people. I'm going to learn more in a journey that's offering lots of surprises. That's how I approach my writing."

Though at heart a withering satirist, Nottage always goes beyond the external to get to the heart and soul of a place or an era, and she always shows a depth of understanding and respect for her characters—usually restless searchers, forgotten people and alienated folks who are trying to fit in or find a connection or are on a quest for identity.

A poetic purveyor of missed and made intimacies, Nottage also has a crush on strange romantic pairings as narrative devices; they're practically a sine qua non of her small but sturdily cantilevered body of work. Sometimes her infatuation for odd couples results in laughable hookups and ill-fated affairs, as when Undine, the high-powered flack of Fabulation, spirals from the ghetto arms of Mo' Dough, a gangsta rapper with gold teeth and progressively twisting baseball cap; to the errant affections of Hervè, a swarthy Argentinean gigolo who eats cruditŽs and knocks her up only to snatch all her money and abandon her; and finally to the sweet aspirations of Guy, the Brooklyn ex-addict she meets in drug therapy.

More frequently, as in Crumbs from the Table of Joy and Las Meninas, Nottage's unlikely lovers fly in the face of racial, social and sexual conventions after having been flung together by the caprices of history or politics: The God-fearing black father and his new German refugee bride in the former play, as well as Queen Marie-Thérèse of France (the wife of Louis XIV) and the African dwarf Nabo in the latter, are nothing if not mismatched souls who discover each other in moments of desperate need, estrangement and lonely vulnerability. (To put this point in extravagant relief, try casting Las Meninas with all black actors, mostly made up as white aristocrats in rococo masks, as in Jean Genet's The Blacks.) "These plays are making a statement about the nature of love, which is sometimes blind," Nottage muses. "We can't control or make decisions about how our hearts travel."

Few American dramatists aspire to such a panoramic view of the world or manage it so engagingly. Curious and imaginative, subtle and intricate, each Nottage play is richer and more incisive than the one before. Hers is not just a world of incident, intrigue and adventure but a cartography of complex human interactions that sardonically displays the outward sheen of life's absurdities but is capacious enough, in performance, to let its underlying dignity shine through.

"Lynn is pretty unpredictable," notes director Whoriskey, who shepherded Nottage's breakthrough play, Intimate Apparel, at South Coast Repertory in California and CENTERSTAGE in Baltimore, as well as its companion play, Fabulation, at Playwrights Horizons in New York City. "Intimate Apparel's characters are so sensitively drawn that there's this evolution that happens for actors. Fabulation, on the other hand, is funny and very urban and fast. It's much more of a quick hit. Now she's coming up with another piece, Ruined—again it's going to be a different idea. More than any writer I know, Lynn is really able to transform. You're always curious to know where she's going to go next."

"I don't think there's necessarily a Lynn Nottage voice," muses director Daniel Sullivan, whose crowning Roundabout Theatre Company production of Intimate Apparel, seen in New York City and Los Angeles, is responsible for solidifying Nottage's reputation as a dramatist of the first order. "She can go from the abstract world to the satirical, as she does in Fabulation. She can also create a thoroughly researched piece like Intimate Apparel that lives with great authority in the Victorian world. But it's not as though she will continue storytelling of any particular kind, because she will move on to new worlds."

To grasp Nottage's panoptic view of human affairs, you need only inspect the many private doors of class, race and gender that Esther Mills, the daughter of former slaves, is allowed to pass through at the turn of the past century in Intimate Apparel, the country's most produced play of the 2005-06 season. Then juxtapose the spectrum of social types (a Fifth Avenue bride, a tenderloin whore) in Esther's Gilded Age New York with the scenes of class struggle during Undine's rude fall from an upscale pedestal in Fabulation. Subtitled "The Re-Education of Undine," this latter play is a barbed satire about the perils of self-invention and social climbing, a picaresque fable about bourgeois comeuppance in black America, as flamboyant and full of tough-edged sarcasm as Intimate Apparel is elegant and full of delicacies. Steeped in Africanist elements, Fabulation tracks Undine's angry, panic-stricken descent from the snooty, self-righteous Manhattan "buppies" who boot her out of their club to her dreary working-class Brooklyn roots (Lotto-addicted security guards, welfare flunkies, a haughty crackhead granny), where she is known by her real name, Sharona Watkins. A surreal fusion of "Absolutely Fabulous" and a classic trickster fable, this very tall cautionary urban parable steals its title from a verse of an unfinished epic rap poem about Br'er Rabbit that Undine's maybe-crazy Desert Storm-vet brother, Flow, is composing, which goes:

It 'bout who we be today
And in our fabulating way.
'bout saying that we be
Without a-pology.

The Yoruba have a saying: "One's destiny could not be magically averted, because it is a question of fate." Spiritually, Fabulation is an American descendant of the West African fable, whose animating verve lies in the psychic concept of nyama (energy of action), in which the erotics of laughter convey a moral theme: The past is never truly past.

The brooding, understated Intimate Apparel and the zany, over-the-top Fabulation represent the contradictory impulses and range of Nottage's big-hearted imagination. "The two plays are bookends: I wrote them at the exact same time," Nottage reveals. "For Fabulation, I tried to imagine Esther 100 years later, after she's enjoyed the benefits of the women's rights and civil rights movements and become a fully empowered African-American woman, like Condoleezza Rice—and that was Undine. Esther's journey is about becoming empowered, whereas Undine feels completely empowered, so I imagined the opposite journey for her. She falls on hard times, goes through this spiral downward, goes back to her roots. In the end, they both achieve the same thing, which is finding self."

Elaborately constructed out of a series of personal encounters, Intimate Apparel tells of the self-effacing Esther's proud pursuit of love in suggestive, novelistic strokes. The yearning to be touched and the tactile pleasures of fabric run woven as leitmotifs throughout. The reason audiences have been utterly captivated by the play, that critics have thrown a garland of major prizes at its feet, that theatre companies across the country have been powerfully drawn to it, has to do with its satisfying density: the rare skill by which it builds tension and pathos to a conclusion that is both quiet and emotionally shattering.

"People like plays about history, but people love doing Intimate Apparel because its characters are so pre-Freudian—they speak about their feelings through clothing and business relations," Whoriskey ventures. "Nobody actually talks about their emotional life. You're constantly guessing at how people are feeling as you witness their actions. Lynn has written specific stage directions, and it would be a good idea for them to be followed. The story is in the behavior."

Director Sullivan compares Nottage with David Mamet. "Certainly what is not spoken between Esther and the Jewish fabric-seller Mr. Marks is the heart of the play," he says. "The sadness of it is that theirs is the deepest relationship in the play. What Lynn understood, that Mamet did not understand when he attempted to put his rhythmic language within the Victorian framework of Boston Marriage, is what you don't say—the strictures of language that don't allow you to express yourself, and that can be dramatically viable."

Crafted with the lyricism, well-made structure and knowing touches of an extraordinarily fine work of period fiction, Intimate Apparel does more than thoroughly entertain—it informs and transports audiences in a way that would be second only to the experience itself. It deserves a place in the pantheon of American dramatic realism of Alice Childress, Lorraine Hansberry, Ntozake Shange and Pearl Cleage.

Written seven years after Mud, River, Stone, Intimate Apparel is an anomaly in Nottage's oeuvre. It is her most personal play to date, the byproduct of a traumatic period that began in 1997 with the death of Nottage's mother, Ruby, of Lou Gehrig's disease followed two months later by the birth of her daughter Ruby.

"My mother taught me how to be an independent thinker, which I think impacts the way I approach my work," says Nottage, interviewed in the comfortably appointed living room of her Brooklyn home in Boerum Hill. The walls are bedecked with artwork from her parents' friends, who include the painters Norman Lewis, Ernest Crichlow and Romare Bearden. "She encouraged me from the time I was very young to travel and explore the world. She was a passionate, beautiful woman, a humanist who lived by her convictions. She was politically active until the moment she literally couldn't expand her lungs full enough to exhale words."

In a way, Nottage's feelings of filial loss lend seriousness and urgency to Intimate Apparel, whose Esther is loosely based on her Barbadian great grandmother, Ethel Boyce, who arrived in New York alone in 1902 to work as a seamstress specializing in women's undergarments. Despite the family prediction that she would remain a spinster, Ethel began corresponding with a Barbadian laborer consigned to the Panama Canal, George Armstrong, who had seen a portrait of her hanging above her uncle's bunk. It was to be a short-lived marriage. In a perhaps apocryphal story, George died prematurely when a stone hit him on the head while he was proselytizing on a speaker's corner.

Not much else is known about Ethel and George. All that's left is a striking passport photograph of Ethel from the early 1920s. "For whatever reason—these are the idiosyncrasies of families—my grandmother became paranoid in her old age," Nottage says. "In addition to not wanting people to steal her precious things, she didn't want people to have these photographs. She began hiding them all over the house. You can find photographs in the weirdest places." After shaking out every polyester dress and tattered fur, Nottage found the sepia passport photo tucked carelessly into an old Family Circle magazine.

"It has taken me the act of writing a new play to rescue the members of my family from storage," Nottage wrote in an essay, "Lives Rescued from Silence," for the Los Angeles Times. "Sitting in the main hall of the New York Public Library, I had an epiphany: If my family hadn't preserved our stories, and history certainly had not, then who would?"

Since she lost her own mother and after she had became a parent herself, Nottage says, "I feel like a different writer. I can't tell you how I've changed, but motherhood has changed the way in which I view the world."

Her friend Seret Scott detects a new fluency—a blossoming—in Nottage's playwriting since she came out of her private shell in 2002 with Intimate Apparel and Fabulation. Scott says, "Lynn's writing was always elegant and humorous, but now I feel that she can put down the most ordinary person in the world—people who are otherwise considered uneducated or unintelligent—and invest them with nuance. In terms of character, those nuances are fluid. You don't feel any bumps. Her plays give working-class characters something that allows them to rise above the station our society generally boxes them in."

In her writing, as in her travels, Nottage has also been making bold political choices. Having embraced the role of theatrical preserver, Nottage is a modern-day por'knocker mining for gold among the buried stories, historical archives, faraway African villages and erased or discarded lives. But, she says, ultimately "I speak only for myself. When I look back at history, I'm very aware that I'm doing so through my own personal filter, which is that of an African-American woman living in the 21st century."