— Updated: 2:21 pm -->Lynn Nottage Awarded Steinberg Prize
By PATRICK HEALYLucas Jackson/Reuters
Lynn NottageThe $200,000 Steinberg award for playwriting, the most lucrative prize in theater, will go to Lynn Nottage for her body of work that most recently includes the 2009 Pulitzer Prize recipient “Ruined,” the Harold and Mimi Steinberg Charitable Trust announced on Monday.
The distinguished playwright award is presented every other year; the first winner, in 2008, was Tony Kushner (“Angels in America,” “Caroline, or Change”). In alternating years the trust gives awards to playwrights at earlier stages of their careers — a category that generated some debate in 2009 among the award’s judges, who had different views on the definition of an emerging writer. That year Bruce Norris (“Clybourne Park”) received a $50,000 award, and David Adjmi (“Stunning”) and Tarell Alvin McCraney (“The Brother/Sister Plays”) received $25,000 apiece.
Ms. Nottage, 45, has several plays to her credit, including “Intimate Apparel” and “Mud, River, Stone”; her latest, “By the Way, Meet Vera Stark,” will have its premiere Off Broadway at Second Stage Theater in the spring. During an interview on Monday before a “Vera Stark” workshop, Ms. Nottage said she was overwhelmed by the Steinberg honor and its cash award.
“There’s a real sense of satisfaction after so many years in the trenches, when I was pretty much living day-to-day and holding onto my money like a miser,” Ms. Nottage said, “though there’s also this ‘why me?’ guilt when I think about all the other writers still in the trenches.” She said that she planned to save the money for long-term family needs; she and her husband have a 12-year-old and a 19-month-old.
“Ruined,” about a group of physically and emotionally scarred prostitutes in war-torn Congo, won virtually every award that it qualified for during its seven-month run Off Broadway in 2009. That Manhattan Theater Club production, despite being critically acclaimed and extended multiple times, never sufficiently swayed commercial producers to transfer it to Broadway, making the play ineligible for a Tony Award. It took time for Ms. Nottage to make peace with the Broadway disappointment, she said.
“I’ve pretty much moved on, in large part because I feel the journey of the play to regional theaters and overseas is ultimately more important,” Ms. Nottage said. “With more people and more cities having access to the play, this part of history can be more a part of current conversation about the treatment of women and the history of Africa.” Ms. Nottage is now adapting “Ruined” into a screenplay; the drama has been optioned by HBO, she said.
Lynn Nottage’s “Ruined” Headed To HBO Thanks To Oprah Winfrey
Playwright Lynn Nottage’s 2009 Pulitzer Prize-winning drama Ruined, is to be produced by HBO Films and Oprah Winfrey’s Harpo Productions.
Nottage will be writing the teleplay (no director nor cast attached yet), which is about “a tough brothel/bar-keeper named Mama Nadi, who is trying to make a buck in the chaos of civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Atrocities external and under her own roof threaten her and the lives of those she is protecting.”
The play has been playing in regional theatres throughout North America.
In addition to the Pulitzer Prize for drama, Nottage won the 2010 Steinberg Distinguished Playwright Award – a $200,000 cash prize – plus a host of honors including the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play, Drama Desk Awards for Outstanding Play and Outstanding Music for a Play, the Outer Critics Circle Award for Outstanding Off-Broadway Play, and Four OBIE Awards including Best New American Play.
The title, Ruined, refers to a woman’s condition after she is raped, and genitally mutilated.
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