Lynn Nottage: ‘There’s no such thing as the perfect sandwich or song – just the joy that goes into creating’
Lynn Nottage has two shows in London but is not nearly as busy as last year, when she had three premieres in New York. She was juggling so much, she says, that she came down with shingles. The Brooklyn-born playwright is recovered now; serene, articulate and with a professorial air, she sits at the Kiln theatre, where Mlima’s Tale is running, while Clyde’s is about to open at the Donmar Warehouse.
Clyde’s bears shades of Nottage’s 2015 Pulitzer prize-winning drama Sweat, set among Pennsylvanian rustbelt factory workers, which arguably saw Trumpian populism coming. The new play revolves around former prisoners working at a truckers’ sandwich stop-off and features a character from Sweat: Jason, an ex-con and white supremacist, who comes into their kitchen. The role is resumed by Patrick Gibson, who starred in Sweat in 2018 at the Donmar, when it was staged by Lynette Linton, now directing Clyde’s.
While it is a standalone piece, there are some subliminal connections, says Nottage. “I was interested in what happens if you bring that character into this liminal space where there are people who are really trapped by circumstances, all formerly incarcerated, and are trying to resurrect their lives.”
The play as a whole is “really about whether they can figure out how to escape the space despite society really not wanting to welcome them back … We live in a society where, if you’re formerly incarcerated, you are still stigmatised … You’re always going to be connected to the worst thing that you’ve ever done.”
These characters came out of research Nottage carried out for Sweat, in Reading, Pennsylvania.“When I was doing my interviews, I went to halfway houses and homeless shelters and encountered many formerly incarcerated people. I didn’t deal with that [subject] when I was writing Sweat but it remained in the back of my head as something that I wanted to write about.”
Alongside the conflict between characters there is communion in their kitchen: singing, dancing, flirtation, and creative expression through the figure of Montrellous, who embodies the healing power of cooking. Some sandwichmaking scenes are so vivid that I wonder if Nottage is a foodie herself?“I have friends who are foodies so when the new restaurant opens they’re there. I’m not quite that person, but my husband and I love to cook. We can be adventurous and hunt for culinary delights.”
At the time Nottage was writing Clyde’s, she was also working on the book for a Broadway show about Michael Jackson, MJ: The Musical, and she feels they have overlapping themes despite the apparent gulf between their central subjects. “It’s about striving for perfection and realising there is no such thing as the perfect sandwich or the perfect song or the perfect dance. What there is is just the intention, the process, and the joy that goes into creating.”
The musical is set to open in the West End next spring and centres on two days in Jackson’s life during his Dangerous tour in 1992-93. Nottage has previously explained how allegations against Jackson of child sexual abuse, in the documentary Finding Neverland, came out after this musical had been written. (The Michael Jackson estate, which co-produced the musical, has vehemently denied all allegations; Jackson was acquitted of child molestation in 2005.) “We made the decision that we wanted to continue to focus on that one aspect of Michael Jackson’s life and it was very specifically those two days.” Of course, she adds, audiences bring whatever they want to the experience. “There are people who come for catharsis, people who come because they want to interrogate his legacy, people who come because they love Michael in all aspects. We wanted to create a piece that could sustain the complexity of all of that.”
Does she like Jackson and his music less though, because of the tainted legacy?“That’s kind of reductionist … A phrase that I always lean into is to ‘sustain the complexity’.” She does still love the music, and Jackson, too. And she does not want to diminish the work she has done. “I find that so often when we’re discussing this issue that it turns to some place where it feels like an interrogation as opposed to a conversation, and what the musical is is a conversation about Michael Jackson’s creativity and artistry.”
Point taken. So is there a favourite record? “I’m partial to Off the Wall and I do like Thriller. Those are the two defining Michael Jackson records for me.”
Mlima’s Tale, meanwhile, which originally premiered off-Broadway in 2018, is a play about ivory hunting. It may seem like very different fare from Nottage’s body of work, but it has the same strong social conscience and underlying themes of power, inequality and capitalism. Set in Kenya, it follows the global journey of ivory smuggling, from the Somali poachers hired to kill the big tusker, Mlima, to its illegal route out of Africa and into the home of a wealthy Chinese couple, for whom it becomes a status symbol or trophy.
The trigger for the play was a conversation with Kathryn Bigelow, the Oscar-winning director, who Nottage says is “deeply invested in the plight of elephants”. When they began working on the project, “poaching had escalated and it felt like we were on the verge of an extinction event. Fortunately, since then, there have been laws and regulations that have been put into place.”
Nevertheless, it remains part of a bigger, urgent conversation today. “We have to be cognisant of the fact that climate change is not just impacting us, it’s impacting the entire ecosystem and animals are in jeopardy as well, even more so … With poaching, the landscapes that people used to farm on and herd their cows in is shrinking, so desperation leads people [such as poachers] to make very extreme choices, and that’s what we’re seeing.”
What does it mean to Nottage, more generally, to be making theatre in the aftermath of so many seismic events, from #MeToo to Black Lives Matter to Covid? “You say aftermath but I feel like we’re still in the midst of all of that, because we’re still experiencing the shockwave of Covid, the shockwave of the Black Lives Matter movement … Theatre in the US hasn’t recovered from Covid. Audiences have shrunk and theatres [in New York] have shrunk their seasons down. Some are dark in September ...”
And yet, isn’t there enormous wealth and elitism in the industry alongside that? Take the recent furore over Plaza Suite, the Broadway show starring Sarah Jessica Parker and Matthew Broderick coming to London next year with ticket prices reportedly up to £395. How does she feel about that? “I would lean into that phrase, ‘sustain the complexity’ again. The audience that wants to see Plaza Suite are going to be a more privileged audience and they’re going to be willing to pay the price. If The Wiz came to the West End and those tickets were £400, I’d be 100% up in arms … This doesn’t surprise me because I don’t think they’re really interested in inviting diversity into their audience. Their goal is purely to provide a certain kind of entertainment to a wealthy audience. What they’re saying in their ticket prices is that they’re not worried at all about being inclusive.”
She is heartened by Britain’s subsidised sector and its ticket prices. “The last time I was here I went to see a play at the Bush and I was just so thrilled by how young and Black the audience was for this particular play. I thought, ‘Oh, the play found its audience.’ We have less of that luxury in the US where the tickets just tend to be more expensive.”
Nottage is the only woman to have won two Pulitzer prizes for drama (the first was in 2009, for Ruined). But when she won her second for Sweat in 2017, she spoke of a glass ceiling and what an “uphill battle” it had been for her as an African American playwright to break through, pointing out how Broadway had staged just two plays by women that year. How have things changed since? “That’s such a complicated question because, right now we’re in such an incredible state of flux. Yes, after George Floyd and – quote unquote the cultural reckoning – pressure was put on many cultural institutions to interrogate their practices … There was this kneejerk reaction where some moved very quickly to bring in diversity equity programmes and audits in which they found ‘oh yeah, we don’t have any people of colour who are back-stages, or administrators or publicists’. But what they didn’t do was put an infrastructure in place to support those folks, and to nurture those folks, and to protect those folks. So we’re finding that there’s pushback on some of the diversity hires, and a lot of artistic directors who were put into these wonderful positions of power are finding they can’t do their jobs because they have boards that don’t support them, and audiences who don’t support them … On paper, a lot of institutions committed to change … But two years later, we’re experiencing the growing pains and some people, when they’re in pain, run away from it.”
Issues of race and inclusion have always been embedded in the work of some Black writers: “It’s not new for us,” she says. “The question is for other writers out there, who have wilfully chosen to ignore diversity in their writing, and whether they’re willing to lean into telling the truth about the world that we live in.”
Clyde’s is at the Donmar Warehouse, London, until 2 December. Mlima’s Tale is at the Kiln theatre, London, until 21 October.