'Super Excited' Pulitzer Winner Lynn Nottage Celebrates with Flat Champagne

Less than two hours after having won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, Ruined playwright Lynn Nottage took to the phones to talk about her “awfully good day.” Speaking calmly but happily, Nottage says, “I was sitting at home in my bathrobe, in the process of procrastinating, and the phone rang,” with the Associated Press on the horn to deliver the good news.

Surely Nottage must have been expecting a call at exactly 3PM on April 20. “You know, there had been some hype, but in the words of Public Enemy, ‘Don’t believe the hype.’ So I hadn’t invested in [winning]. I really hadn’t. Because you don’t imagine that these things are going to happen. I firmly believe that if I gave power to the award, I would diminish the power of the play—and I feel like the play stands with or without [a Pulitzer].”

Indeed it does: Ruined drew some of the season’s best reviews for its depiction of life inside a bar in war-torn Congo. [For more on the play and Manhattan Theatre Club’s current off-Broadway production, click here].

Once the news was official, Nottage says, “I was super excited. I popped open a bottle of Dom Perignon that I had been keeping for six years, and I drank a glass of it only to discover that it had turned. But I still drank it. I kid you not!”

Pundits had predicted that the only thing that might tip the award away from Ruined is the Pulitzer board’s stated preference for a play “dealing with American life.” Says Nottage, “Here’s my spin on it, that this is a play about American themes. Because the war in the Congo is essentially being fought to sustain our lifestyle. We live in a global society, and I don’t think we can talk about quote unquote ‘American themes’ anymore."

As for the challenge of taking a real-life political situation and transforming it into a compelling play, Nottage says, “It was tough. I think that’s why it took so long, because I didn’t want to write a play about war that would turn people off. I wanted people to get to know these characters, and feel for these characters, so that when they left they’d feel compelled to act. That meant figuring out a way to find a balance.”

Nottage has nothing but praise for Kate Whoriskey’s off-Broadway production, which began at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre before opening on February 10 at MTC. “I have a phenomenal director. I have an absolutely amazing, dedicated, generous cast. And I think those two things are rare.”

But what of Broadway? Is it bittersweet that Nottage's Pulitzer Prize-winning play is not running on the Great White Way? “Is it bittersweet?” she muses, pausing for a moment before taking yet another congratulatory call. “I would love to have the play on Broadway, but I always feel that it’s a bonus just to have a play produced.”