Lynn Nottage

People probably have different philosophies about this, but I think that when you're first shaping the play and trying to find a character, the initial actors that develop it end up imprinting on it - you hear their voices; you hear their rhythms. You can't help but to begin to write toward them during the rehearsal process.

There were not a lot of women in the theater department - it was really run by men, and so the message was that women can be onstage, but women can't really be backstage.

The person whose work introduced me to the craft was Lorraine Hansberry. The person who taught me to love the craft was Tennessee Williams. The person who really taught me the power of the craft was August Wilson, and the person who taught me the political heft of the craft was Arthur Miller.

I was repeatedly told that there isn't an African American woman who can open a show on Broadway. I said, 'Well, how do we know? How do we know if we don't do it?' I said, 'I think you're wrong.'

Once working people discover that, collectively, we have more power than we do as individual silos, then we become an incredibly powerful force. But I think that there are powers that be that are invested in us remaining divided along racial lines, along economic lines.

It's incumbent on us to reach beyond the confines of the institutions that traditionally produce art and find new ways to get it to the people.

My grandfather was a Pullman porter, and my father put his way through college by cleaning floors at night in the libraries. I understand that working people are in some way the bedrock of my existence and the existence of many people here.

By the sheer act of writing, we are trying to place value on the stories that we're invested in.

In listening to the narratives of the Congolese, I came to terms with the extent to which their bodies had become battlefields.

I remain committed to telling the stories of women of the African diaspora, particularly those stories that don't often find their way into the mainstream media.

There is an enduring feeling that women can write domestic dramas but don't have the muscularity or the vision to write state-of-the-nation narratives.

I'm interested in people who are dwelling outside the mainstream. And very often, those people happen to be woman of color.

I wonder: Would there be a black president if people hadn't already begun imagining, through film and television, that a black man is president? It's self-actualization.

I love my people's history. I feel a huge responsibility to tell the stories of my past and my ancestors' past.

I can't quite remember the exact moment when I became obsessed with writing a play about the seemingly endless war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, but I knew that I wanted to somehow tell the stories of the Congolese women caught in the cross-fire.

The more you go to a theatre and the more you hear stories you aren't necessarily familiar with, the more open you become.

I wanted to tell the story of these women and the war in the Congo and I couldn't find anything about them in the newspapers or in the library, so I felt I had to get on a plane and go to Africa and find the story myself. I felt there was a complete absence in the media of their narrative. It's very different now, but when I went in 2004 that was definitely the case.