Lynn Nottage Wins Pulitzer Prize for Drama for Ruined

Playwright Lynn Nottage has won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for Ruined, which is currently playing Manhattan Theatre Club after its original run at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago.

The play is about a group of abused women in the Congo trying to survive during wartime. Earlier today, the show received five Outer Critics Circle Award nominations, including Outstanding Off-Broadway Play. Nottage’s other plays include Intimate Apparel, Fabulation, and Crumbs From the Table of Joy.

In a phone interview conducted this afternoon, Nottage told TheaterMania that her greatest challenge in writing the play was “taking on a subject that is so complicated and figuring out how not to alienate or to frighten the audience. I knew it was going to be difficult to get people to sit through a play about rape in the Congo, but I also felt a much greater urgency in writing this play than I have ever before.” She added that her hope in Ruined winning the Pulitzer is “that it will keep the conversation about these subjects alive. My vindication in writing the play has truly been audiences coming to the theater night after night.”

Gina Gionfriddo’s Becky Shaw, which played the Humana Festival and New York’s Second Stage Theater, and the Broadway musical In the Heights by Lin-Manuel Miranda and Quiara Alegria Hudes were finalists for the prize.

For a complete list of winners, visit www.pulitzer.org.