Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and screenwriter Lynn Nottage will speak about her plays at 7 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 9, in Illinois State University’s Center for the Performing Arts Theatre. Her presentation, part of the Speaker Series of Illinois State University, is free and open to the public.
Nottage will hold a question-and-answer session with audience members following a performance of her play By The Way, Meet Vera Stark, staged by Illinois State’s School of Theatre and Dance and Crossroads Project, on Saturday, Nov. 8, in the Center for the Performing Arts Theatre. The play begins at 7:30 p.m., with Nottage’s talkback session starting at 10 p.m. Tickets to the play are $17 for adults, $14 for faculty/staff and $12 for students and seniors.
A discussion with Nottage will be held from noon to 1:30 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 9, in the Center for the Performing Arts Theatre. She will provide commentary on scenes from her plays Ruined, Intimate Apparel and others, performed by School of Theatre and Dance students. That event is free and open to the public. A 2 p.m. matinee performance of By The Way, Meet Vera Stark will follow.
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, Audelco, Drama Desk, and Outer Critics Circle Award); 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!.
Nottage 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; First to Fall, directed by Rachel Beth Anderson; and Remote Control. Over the years, she has developed original projects for HBO, Sidney Kimmel Entertainment, Showtime, This is That and Harpo.
Nottage is the recipient of a MacArthur Genius Grant Fellowship, Steinberg Mimi Distinguished Playwright Award, the Dramatists Guild Hull-Warriner Award, the inaugural Horton Foote Prize, Helen Hayes Award, the Lee Reynolds Award and the Jewish World Watch iWitness. She is a graduate of Brown University and the Yale School of Drama, where she has been a faculty member since 2001. She currently teaches graduate playwriting at Columbia School of the Arts.
Nottage’s visit to Illinois State is co-sponsored by the Office of the President, the Harold K. Sage Foundation and the Illinois State University Foundation Fund, the College of Fine Arts, School of Theatre and Dance, and the Crossroad Project.
The Speaker Series of Illinois State University seeks to bring innovative and enlightening speakers to the campus with the aim of providing the community with a platform to foster dialogue, cultivate enriching ideas, and continue an appreciation of learning as an active and lifelong process.
