NEW YORK — It may be an understatement to say that Lynn Nottage has emerged from the COVID-19 pandemic on a high note.
The 57-year-old playwright, who already made history as a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, has blazed more trails with three major theater productions of her works staged in a single Broadway season.
“I feel this incredible sense of pride and accomplishment,” Nottage told the Daily News, speaking of her latest achievement. “You know, little did I know when I began this journey as a playwright that I would be at the spot to have a play on Broadway, a Broadway musical and an opera all happen at the same moment.”
Her Broadway play, “Clyde’s,” wrapped up its strictly limited engagement at the Helen Hayes Theater last month.
The Second Stage Theater-produced show starred Emmy Award-winning Broadway alum Uzo Aduba and Ron Cephas Jones, in a moving narrative about a truck stop sandwich shop that offers its formerly incarcerated kitchen staff a shot at redemption.
Nottage also penned the script to “MJ: The Musical,” which officially opened last week to rave reviews at the Neil Simon Theatre.
Starring Broadway newcomer Myles Frost in the titular role, the Christopher Wheedon-helmed production celebrates the musical legacy of the late King of Pop Michael Jackson.
And then there’s Nottage’s operatic adaptation of “Intimate Apparel,” currently playing at Lincoln Center’s Mitzi E Newhouse Theater through March 6. With music by Ricky Ian Gordon, the Bartlett Sher-helmed production set in 1905 tells the story of a Black seamstress who makes her living sewing corsets and other undergarments while seeking love and romance and embarks on a letter-writing relationship with a mysterious man.
For four days in mid-January, all three shows were wowing die-hard theater fans who braved the highly contagious omicron variant and ventured into tightly packed theaters. Two of the three Nottage-penned shows were impacted by the variant spread at the end of 2021, which led to the closure of at least half of all current Broadway shows and musicals, most temporarily but a few, for good.
“Oh my God, I feel an enormous sense of relief to be on the other side of the theater marathon,” Nottage said of what seemed like an endless stream of postponements and production delays.
“Intimate Apparel,” which marked the Brooklyn native’s first turn as a librettist, was three weeks into previews when it shut down abruptly in March 2020.
“The moment when we discovered that ‘Intimate Apparel’ was going to be paused because of the pandemic, it was actually quite painful,” she shared.
“And when we got the notice from Lincoln Center, Andre Bishop, the artistic director said, ‘But don’t worry, we’ll be back up and running by April 15.’ And so the actors left their of their things in the dressing room, and all of us just assumed a month later that would be back up and running.”
She laughed: “And here we are almost two years later, finally getting the piece back up on the stage.”
Nottage, also an associate professor of theater at Columbia University and two-time Pulitzer winner for “Ruined” (2009) and “Sweat” (2017), revealed that the pandemic was difficult because of the distance it placed between her and her craft. But the time away also proved to be cathartic.
“Theater was one of the few things which we really couldn’t do during the pandemic because it’s an in-person event,” she said. “But what did happen during this moment, it really gave us this pause, really gave us time to interrogate and think about our practices as theater artists, and to look at the ways in which some of the institutions that we’ve been invested in, have actually done harm to us.”
Nottage’s high point during the 2021 season also saw the largest group of Black playwrights with productions as theaters reopened following the 18-month shutdown.
For the first time, Broadway saw eight productions written by Black dramatists: Ruben Santiago-Hudson’s “Lackawanna Blues,” Jeremy O. Harris’ “Slave Play,” Douglas Lyons’ “Chicken & Biscuits,” Antoinette Chinonye Nwandu’s “Pass Over,” Dominique Morisseau “Skeleton Crew” and Keenan Scott II’s “Thoughts of a Colored Man,” the late Alice Childress’ “Trouble in Mind” and Nottage’s “Clydes.”
At the same time, the Broadway Advocacy Coalition (BAC), a nonprofit founded in 2016 to “dismantle the systems that perpetuate racism through the power of storytelling and the leadership of people directly affected,” rose to prominence.
During the 2021 Tony Awards, Nottage received a standing ovation for her support of the arts-based nonprofit organization when she presented BAC president Britton Smith with a special honor.
She told The News about Broadway’s pause: “We felt that in order to come back, we want to come back to a place that did feel more equitable and welcoming and safe and diverse, that it wasn’t prior to the pandemic.
“So this pause really was, in some ways, an unexpected, transformative moment.”
———
