It’s that otherness that allows people to marginalise us and discriminate against us as women and as people of colour.Blizzard Entertainment has released a new animated short for Overwatch at Gamescom this year. You get worn down and this constant conversation means we are still seen as ‘other’. “It points to white privilege that we are seen as ‘exceptional’. Yet Nottage also expressed disappointment that her work was constantly defined by both her own race and gender, unlike her white male counterparts. She pointed out that figures from the Department of Labour, as well as Supreme Court Justice – and advocate for gender equality – Ruth Bader Ginsberg, had recently been in the audience of the play.įuture areas the 51-year-old is keen to explore in her plays includes the American prison industrial complex, which is “destroying the lives of so many men of colour” but is barely talked about in the national conversation or on the stage. Sweat is currently on stage in Washington DC, and Nottage said it had been important to her that it was staged in “the seat of power” during an election year. Pulitzer-prize winning Ruined explored the use of rape as a weapon against women in the Democratic Republic of Congo, while Intimate Apparel focused on a lonely black seamstress working in New York in 1905. Nottage’s two decades of work has garnered praise for bringing challenging and often forgotten, stories onto the stage. It shows we have the ability and the depth of knowledge, and our voices are rich and relevant to everybody, so producing a female-written play is not just a ‘token gesture’ as it is often still dismissed as.” “By having an award that recognises the excellence of women, it sends the message that there is no such thing as tokenism when it comes to the inclusion of women’s voices. “There is an enduring feeling that women can write domestic dramas but don’t have the muscularity or the vision to write state-of-the-nation narratives. Moodie, who played the lead role in a UK production of Nottage’s Intimate Apparel, said female voices were still being neglected “across the board”. Nottage was echoed by actress Tanya Moodie, who was a judge for this year’s Susan Smith Blackburn prize. One would think that in this day and age we wouldn’t have to talk about this. She said: “There’s still a tremendous disparity from the number of women who are produced and the number of women who are actually writing plays. The playwright said that as long as the “built-in gender bias” continued to dominate the theatre industry in both the UK and the US, such women-only awards remained a vital platform to get work by women taken seriously. It was developed through interviews with former steelworkers in the poverty-stricken town of Reading, Pennsylvania. Nottage was awarded the prestigious $25,000 theatre prize, which is in its 38th year, for her play Sweat, which exposes the human cost of America’s industrial decline. You see plays by African American playwrights, by-and-large, have majority Asian or African American cast and are produced either on smaller stages or produced in theatres that are specifically geared towards work by people of colour.” Nottage continued: “I think that theatre has been the last bastion of segregation. Nottage, who won the Pulitzer prize in 2009 for her play Ruined, said progress was happening but “it’s not changing fast enough for many of us.”Īcross American theatres over the past three seasons, only 12% of plays were written by black playwrights, and the latest season of Broadway plays feature no plays, old or new, by black or female writers. There’s a real reluctance to have that conversation in an open honest way on the stage.” I always describe race as the final taboo in American theatre. “Up till now our stories haven’t been heard.
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