Today at Brown

Lynn Nottage ’86 has won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for her harrowing play, Ruined, about a group of women who have been raped and brutalized during the war in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The Pulitzer carries a $10,000 award.

Nottage’s Pulitzer-winning play, Ruined. Ruined is on an extended run at the Manhattan Theatre Club, which coproduced it with Chicago’s Goodman Theatre. To research the story, Nottage traveled to Africa twice and interviewed women whose lives had been destroyed by the war that has raged in Congo for a dozen years. The winner of a 2007 MacArthur “genius” award, she discussed the creation of Ruined in the March/April BAM. She is the first woman and the first African American to win the drama Pulitzer since 2002.

An English concentrator at Brown, Nottage began writing plays in a class with professor Paula Vogel, who won the 1998 Pulitzer for How I Learned to Drive and who left Brown for Yale last year. After graduation, Nottage earned her MFA at the Yale Drama School but spent the next four years working for Amnesty International. In 1993 she committed herself to writing fulltime, and since then she has produced a string of extraordinarily popular and widely produced plays, including Crumbs From the Table of Joy, Intimate Apparel, and Fabulation. In 2003 the BAM interviewed Nottage about her early career.

The other finalists for this year’s drama Pulitzer were also Brown alumnae: Gina Gionfriddo ’97 MFA, for Becky Shaw, and Quiara Alegría Hudes ’04 MFA, for In the Heights, which she coauthored with Lin-Manuel Miranda and which won the Tony Award for Best Musical last fall.

Other alumni to win the Pulitzer for drama include Nilo Cruz ’94 MFA (Anna in the Tropics, 2003) and Alfred Uhry ’58 (Driving Miss Daisy, 1988).

Reprinted with permission from the Brown Alumni Magazine.