2017 Hatfield '67 Lecture: Playwright Lynn Nottage

On February 1, Skillman Library will welcome Lynn Nottage as the 2017 John L. Hatfield ’67 lecturer. Nottage is a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright whose latest play, Sweat, explores the social effects of industrial decline in the U.S. and is the result of extensive interviews conducted with residents of Reading, Pennsylvania.

Lynn Nottage's plays have been produced widely in the United States and throughout the world. They include By The Way, Meet Vera Stark (Lily Award, Drama Desk Nomination), Ruined (Pulitzer Prize, OBIE, Lucille Lortel, New York Drama Critics’ Circle, Drama Desk, Outer Critics Circle Award and Audelco), 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!. Her new play, SWEAT, premiered at Oregon Shakespeare Festival and subsequently played at Arena Stage and the Public Theater. It is scheduled to open on Broadway in March 2017.  In addition, she is working with composer Ricky Ian Gordon on adapting her play Intimate Apparel into an opera (commissioned by The Met/LCT).

She is the co-founder of the production company, Market Road Films, whose most recent projects include The Notorious Mr. Bout directed by Tony Gerber and Maxim Pozdorovkin (Premiere/Sundance 2014), First to Fall directed by Rachel Beth Anderson (Premiere/IDFA, 2013) and Remote Control (Premiere/Busan 2013- New Currents Award). Over the years, she has developed original projects for HBO, Sidney Kimmel Entertainment, Showtime, This is That and Harpo. She recently finished working on Spike Lee’s new Netflix series She’s Gotta Have It.

Nottage is the recipient of a MacArthur “Genius Grant” Fellowship, the Susan Smith Blackburn prize for SWEAT, Steinberg “Mimi” Distinguished Playwright Award, the Dramatists Guild Hull-Warriner Award, the inaugural Horton Foote Prize, Lilly Award, Helen Hayes Award, the Lee Reynolds Award, and the Jewish World Watch iWitness Award. Her other honors include the Doris Duke Artist Award, the Laura Pels Master American Dramatist Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, the National Black Theatre Fest’s August Wilson Playwriting Award, a Guggenheim Grant, PEN/Laura Pels Award, Lucille Lortel Fellowship and Visiting Research Fellowship at Princeton University. She is a graduate of Brown University and the Yale School of Drama, where she has been a faculty member since 2001. She is also teaching graduate playwriting at Columbia School of the Arts.

Lafayette is celebrating Black Heritage Month with guest speakers, poetry, and community discussions throughout the month of February. This year’s theme “Black Agency, Black Express” focuses on forms of media relating to how black people create and shape their lives and the lives of others in their communities.