Meet the Woman Behind "Intimate Apparel"

All of us at Barksdale are excited about the next play in our Signature Season at Willow Lawn, Intimate Apparel by Lynn Nottage. Introducing this beautiful new drama to the Richmond audience doesn't exactly make us trailblazers. Intimate Apparel was America’s most produced play in 2005-06. It won the American Theatre Critics New Play Award and was short-listed for the Pulitzer Prize in 2004. And Nottage was first presented to Richmonders in Benny Sato Ambush’s lovely production of Crumbs from the Table of Joy at TheatreVirginia in 2001-02.

Nonetheless, Lynn Nottage is a brilliant, fresh and inviting voice in American theatre—a playwright whom Richmond theatre artists and audience members need to know. Last year, she was one of three women pictured and identified on the cover of American Theatre Magazine as America’s most impressive emerging female playwrights.

I’m told that Nottage rhymes with “cottage.” It’s revealing that when I first encountered this amazing African-American playwright, I mispronounced her name with a continental élan, guessing incorrectly that you put the emphasis on and softened the second syllable, rhyming it with the visual art term “collage.” It’s quite true that Nottage finds eloquence, poetry and zest in everyday lives. She explores the extraordinary exuberance of individuals who would otherwise almost certainly appear to be lost in the mundane. But I fear that what was revealed by my mispronunciation was not my enthusiasm for her joyous and poetic language or the acute sensitivity of her character studies. More likely it was the subconscious association I made between “African American woman playwright” and the exotic and rare.

Lorraine Hansberry (A Raisin in the Sun), Suzan-Lori Parks (Top Dog / Underdog) and Regina Taylor (Crowns) notwithstanding, African American woman playwrights are still struggling to find their well-deserved place in the front ranks of American arts and letters. In fact, women playwrights in general find themselves in a similar boat.

But here’s where Richmond can step forward with pride and say that Barksdale Theatre is ahead of the pack. Not only have we produced the plays of Hansberry, Parks, Taylor, and now Nottage, but we’ve included the works of women authors in every season since Barksdale and Theatre IV began working cooperatively in 2001. In fact, if you count our soon-to-be-announced seventh season (2007-08), the new Barksdale will have produced 14 plays and musicals written by women authors in half that many years. No other theatre in Virginia and few theatres nationally, can equal this record of commitment and inclusion.

Many if not most theatres produce seasons on a regular basis that include only works by male writers. In Barksdale’s ten years prior to the 2001 connection with Theatre IV, five of the ten were all male.

In 2001, we established our Women’s Theatre Project, committing ourselves to producing great plays by women authors. Many of our biggest hits have been produced as a part of this project: The Little Foxes by Lillian Hellman, To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, Crowns by Regina Taylor, Annie Get Your Gun co-authored by Dorothy Fields, The Exact Center of the Universe by Joan Vail Thorne, The Syringa Tree by Pamela Gien, and our current Hanover Tavern hit, Smoke on the Mountain by Connie Ray.

We’re very proud of Intimate Apparel, and in the next few weeks we’ll be discussing it in greater depth in these blog entries. I hope you’ll do yourself the favor of coming to see it. Until then, please help us spread the word about Barksdale’s Women’s Theatre Project, and read more about Lynn Nottage and her important work. You can find terrific interviews with the playwright at:

www.roundabouttheatre.org/fc/spring04/nottage.htm ; www.ket.org/americanshorts/poof/nottage.htm ; www.tcg.org/publications/at/Oct05/nottage.cfm ; www.phillytheatreco.com/pdfs/PTCplaywise_2006_intimate.pdf .