Lynn Nottage's New Play

I'd be shocked if this didn't get to New York within the next year or so, given the Times rave and the success of her last two plays. I imagine one of the major companies will pick it up.

Saw it in Ashland this past Friday. It was extremely well done and a very powerful and poignant piece of theater. The post show discussion with Jack Willis, the actor who played the bartender, about the collaborative process the cast went through with Lynn to tweak the play as they were in rehearsals was fascinating.

Updated On: 8/18/15 at 01:58 PM

From an interview with Lynn Nottage.

I need to ask about the future of Ruined. Is there still talk about it going to Broadway or being a movie?
No. You know, it’s there. People still ask me, but I also feel like now is not the moment for it to be on Broadway. There’s still a part of me that feels like a commercial production about the lives of those women somehow doesn’t rest well. That’s just me. I would love more people to see it, but I don’t want people to pay $150 to do that.

I guess there is something weird about that.
There is something weird about it, and it makes me very uncomfortable. I think it would have been different if, in its organic life coming out of Manhattan Theatre Club, there was still that momentum because people really wanted to see it—fine. But I feel like, to remount it now, and can we get big enough stars to do it? That’s not what I’m interested in it. Nor do I think Broadway should always be the endgame. In thinking about Sweat: Why can’t the endgame be this social sculpture we’re doing in Reading? One of the things we’re looking at is, Why can’t it be theatre that goes outside the proscenium?

I always tell my students, The problem is that you have all these institutions that have invested in buildings that are very expensive and have to be maintained, and they have to have something to put on their stage and to feed the desires of their subscribers, and as a result they’re selecting work that is popular enough to sell tickets. Which means that writers are creating work to get produced. And I’m like, What if you stopped thinking that way? Theatre today doesn’t have to exist in the proscenium anymore.

Vera Stark would be good on Broadway, though, as a kind of boulevard comedy.
Yeah, Vera Stark is designed for that. We did talk about it, and one of the things Carole [Rothman, at Second Stage] has said is, Wouldn’t it be great if we had the space on Broadway to move it to? Vera Stark would have been one of those plays, because it was selling exceptionally well. We could have just moved it right into a Broadway house and it could have had a life.

But I feel like Broadway’s always been dangled as that carrot that we should be moving toward, and as an artist, that’s not the place I imagine my work ending.

I saw the play in Ashland as well and thought it was extremely powerful and overall excellent. It will definitely be a piece of theatre that will remain with me for a long time. I saw this right after the incredible production of Long Day's Journey Into Night, and my heart was broken and stomped on by each. I hope that it has a long life but I think that an Off-Broadway run is much more appropriate than a commercial Broadway run.