LPTW To Present Oral History With Playwright Lynn Nottage

The League of Professional Theatre Women (Kelli Lynn Harrison & Catherine Porter, Co-Presidents), an organization which has been leading the gender parity conversation and championing women in the professional theatre for over 35 years, will present its first Oral History Project of 2019 with Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Lynn Nottage on Monday, February 4 starting at 6pm in the Bruno Walter Auditorium at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts (111 Amsterdam Avenue at 65th Street). Admission to the event is FREE and seats are available on a first-come-first-seated basis. Doors will open at 5:30pm.

Oral History, founded and produced for 26 years by Betty Corwin (who recently retired at 97), is currently produced by Ludovica Villar-Hauser in association with Sophia Romma, and is an ongoing program of the League of Professional Theatre Women, in partnership with the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts which chronicles and documents the contributions of significant theatre women in all fields. Playwright and screenwriter Lynn Nottage will talk about her life and prolific career with theatre journalist Elisabeth Vincentelli.

The League of Professional Theatre Women's Oral History Project has previously featured interviews with such notables as Billie Allen, Kia Corthron, Tyne Daly, Carmen DeLavallade, Christine Ebersole, Baayork Lee, Laura Linney, Patti LuPone, Frances McDormand, Bebe Neuwirth, Chita Rivera, Daryl Roth, Mercedes Ruehl, Paula Vogel, and many other theatrical legends. Annually, the legacies of three theatre women are preserved through the Oral History program, in which a theatre woman luminary is interviewed by the interviewer of their choice and they discuss their life and career before a live audience. The tapes are then housed in The New York Public Library's Theatre on Film and Tape Archive.

Lynn Nottage is a playwright and screenwriter; she is the first (and remains the only) woman to have won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama twice. Her plays have been produced widely in the United States and throughout the world. Her most recent play, Mlima's Tale, premiered at The Public Theater in May 2018. In the spring of 2017, Sweat (Pulitzer Prize, Obie Award, Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, Tony Nomination, Drama Desk Nomination) moved to Broadway after a sold out run at The Public Theater. Other plays include By Floyd's (upcoming, Guthrie Theater); The Way, Meet Vera Stark (Lilly 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! She is working with composer Ricky Ian Gordon on adapting her play Intimate Apparel into an opera, commissioned by The Met/LCT. She is currently an artist-in-residence at the Park Avenue Armory. Nottage is currently writing the book for the world premiere musical adaptation of Sue Monk Kidd's novel The Secret Life of Bees, with music by Duncan Sheik and lyrics by Susan Birkenhead. It will premiere at the Atlantic Theatre Company starting on May 10, 2019, directed by Sam Gold. She is also currently writing the book to a musical featuring the music of Michael Jackson. She is a graduate of Brown University and the Yale School of Drama. She is also an Associate Professor in the Theatre Department at Columbia School of the Arts.

Elisabeth Vincentelli writes about the arts, mostly theater, for a variety of publications including The New York Times, The New Yorker, Newsday, The Wall Street Journal, The Hollywood Reporter and Departures. She was chief theater critic of The New York Post from 2009 to 2016; prior to that she was arts and entertainment editor at Time Out New York for several years. She co-created and co-hosts the "Three on the Aisle" podcast, hosted by American Theatre magazine, with Peter Marks of The Washington Post and Terry Teachout of The Wall Street Journal. She is a member of the New York Drama Critics' Circle, and served as the group's vice-president from 2009 to 2016. Elisabeth has contributed to several anthologies and has written two books about ABBA, along with the liner notes for the reissue of the compilation ABBA Gold. She earned her B.A. at the Institute of Political Science in Paris and her M.A. at Rutgers University-New Brunswick.

THE LEAGUE OF PROFESSIONAL THEATRE WOMEN (a not-for-profit 501(c)(3) organization) has been championing women and leading the gender parity conversation in the professional theatre for over 35 years. Since its founding, the LPTW's membership has grown to 500+ theatre artists and practitioners of all backgrounds, across multiple disciplines, working in the commercial and non-profit sectors. To increase visibility of and opportunities for women in the field, the LPTW spearheads events, public programming, advocacy initiatives, media, and publications that celebrate industry luminaries, preserve the legacy of historic visionaries, raise awareness of the importance of nurturing women's voices, and shine a spotlight on the imperative of striving for gender parity and fostering a diversity of expression, both in the theatre world and the world at large. To find out more about how you can support its endeavors, please visit www.theatrewomen.org.

This program is made possible by major support from the Edith Meiser Foundation, and in part, with public funds from the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council, and with funds from the NYS Council on the Arts, a state agency, with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo.

Photo credit: Susan Johann