Lynn Nottage. Photo by Henry Luetwyler.

To see scenes, photos and more from Ruined, click here.

In the fall of 2007, dramatist Lynn Nottage received the prestigious MacArthur Foundation Award. On January 10, 2008, journalist Alexis Greene, spoke with the 43-year-old playwright about her award and her new play, RUINED. Set in the Democratic Republic of Congo, RUINED focuses on a brothel-owner named Mama Nadi, who juggles greed and generosity in order to survive in the war-ravaged country. The play is co-produced with Chicago’s Goodman Theatre and made its New York debut at Manhattan Theatre Club on January 21, 2009.

ALEXIS GREENE: First, hearty congratulations on your MacArthur Award.

LYNN NOTTAGE: Thank you.

AG: I’m curious: how does the MacArthur Foundation inform a recipient that she has won a grant?

LN: You get a phone call. In the middle of the day. I’ve been told that they arrange with someone ahead of time to ensure that you’re available the day that they call. A friend of mine later told me that she had been approached, to ensure that I was going to be by my telephone.

AG: What was your reaction?

LN: Complete and total shock. You never anticipate that you’re going to get that type of phone call, because those are the sorts of things that happen to other people. And they don’t let you know that you are nominated. I was talking to another playwright at the time – Katori Hall, whom I mentor – and it was one of those days where I was feeling very self-pitying: “Oh, woe is me, I’m just a lowly playwright.” I was talking about how exciting it is that she’s at the beginning of her career and so talented and doing so well. Then the phone clicks, and I say, “Hold on, let me see who it is.” And there’s a voice saying, “Are you by yourself and are you sitting down?” And I’m like, “Who is this?” And he says, “Well, I’m calling from the MacArthur Foundation.” And I thought, “He’s calling to ask me to be on a panel; oh, God, I don’t want to be on another panel.” And then he said, “I have good news.” That’s when my heart began to beat really fast, and things were literally a blur as he imparted the good news. And he said, “This is the last time we will call you. You won’t hear from us. You will just begin receiving checks for the next five years, every quarter.” I was like, “What if I need to get in touch with you? What if I want to have a conversation? What if I need you?”

AG: What was your family’s response?

LN: They were very excited. My father, after it was announced in the newspapers, made photo copies of the articles and stood in the front yard and handed them out to the neighborhood.

AG: Let’s talk about another event in your career: your new play RUINED. Were you commissioned to write it?

LN: I began the play before I got a commission. I began developing it with the director Kate Whoriskey. We had worked on Intimate Apparel and then Fabulation, and throughout that period we were always talking about how wonderful it would be to do a modern adaptation of Brecht’s Mother Courage set in the Democratic Republic of Congo. We wanted to figure out a way to discuss war, since we’re in the midst of a war, but to look at it from a woman’s point of view. I spontaneously suggested that we go to Africa and begin doing research. We couldn’t go to the Congo, because the country was still very much in the midst of a war that had been going on for ten years. So we decided to go to Uganda; I knew some people there, and it was also a place into which many refugees were flooding from the Congo. We flew into Entebbe, which is about an hour outside of Kampala. We stayed in Kampala.

When we started interviewing the Congolese refugee women, we found that the story they were telling was very specific to the region. Regardless of age, social status, or race – in one case we interviewed a white woman who was a refugee – they all had one thing in common: they had been raped. At the time – this was 2004 – there weren’t the newspaper reports coming out about that, and I was just astonished that rape had become a horrific tool of war, but that it was not part of a collective discussion about the war in the Congo. Right after we left, Amnesty International put out its big report on rape in the Congo.

AG: You are talking about unusually savage rape.

LN: It’s not a sexual act. It’s a brutal act of violence. They use things like bayonets.

AG: How did you find the women you spoke with?

LN: Through a number of different sources. I had worked in human rights for many years, and before we went I called various organizations and people that I knew, and asked for their contacts in Africa. They put me in touch with people from refugee organizations, and then Amnesty said they would serve as our formal base, so we were able to bring all the women there to do the interviews.

AG: What languages did the women speak?

LN: That depended on their class. Some women spoke Swahili, some of the more educated women spoke French.

AG: In RUINED, the central character, Mama Nadi, who runs the brothel, is much like Mother Courage. Did you actually meet someone like Mama Nadi?

LN: There wasn’t specifically a woman like Mama that I interviewed. But one of the things I left with was this notion of resilience, because all of these women, despite the horrific things that they’d been through, were still able to find humor and smile and were determined to survive. I thought I was going to find broken women, but I found women who had been brutalized but were determined to move on. So that was the aspect of Mama that I discovered in the women I interviewed. One of the things that the women didn’t want to talk about is that many had to turn to prostitution in order to survive. A lot of them had been shunned by their communities because they had been raped, and in many instances they had suffered medical problems that needed operations to be corrected; even friends didn’t want to take these women in, because they had problems like leakage and smelled of urine.

AG: I presume that their husbands had rejected them.

LN: Their husbands had rejected them, their communities had rejected them, they needed money for medical expenses and operations. The only thing they could do was turn to prostitution.

AG: Had they contracted AIDS?

LN: I imagine some of them will eventually turn up HIV-positive, but it was not the conversation that we had. It is sort of strange to say, but the women were more concerned about just being able to go to the bathroom and urinate. If they have AIDS, then down the line that’s the next thing that they would have to deal with.

AG: How does the prostitution operate?

LN: It operates in different tiers. My husband, who is a filmmaker, was recently in the Congo, and he was saying that there’s a level of prostitution which feeds the ex-pat community: aid workers who are either away from their families or are forced to be there for long periods of time; Russian pilots; diplomats who are serviced by prostitutes in the bigger cities like Goma.

But the prostitution that I’m looking at in Ruined rises around what I call “Old West” towns that spring out of mining. These towns grow very quickly, and one of the things that come first is a brothel. Mama runs one of those brothels that services miners and soldiers.

What I didn’t include in this play, but you find in mining towns, is that the men want long-term prostitutes, what they call “camp wives.” So the brothels, rather than providing one-night stands, provide women who will service the men for the entirety of their stays –three months, six months. When a man leaves, she’s on to another. Rather than receiving money, she’s paid by being cared for. She’s fed and clothed for the period of time she’s servicing this man.

AG: Did the women want to talk with you?

LN: When they were sharing the stories, it felt as though it was cathartic for them. I heard time and time again that “we never get the opportunity to tell our stories”; or, “Thank you for listening to my story.” I saw the need for these women to unburden themselves, to share and be heard.

AG: Did you and Kate Whoriskey tape the women?

LN: We made audio tapes and video tapes. My fantasy is that when we do the play at the Goodman, we’ll be able to present some of the interviews that we conducted on monitors in the lobby.

AG: You must have come back with an extensive amount of personal testimony. How did you shape the play?

LN: It took a very long time for me to process what I had heard and seen, and figure out the kind of story I wanted to tell. I didn’t want to write something that was didactic, heavy-handed, or alienating – that people wouldn’t listen to. On the other hand, so much of political theatre strikes you in the gut, without giving you an opportunity to truly feel what’s going on. I wanted to create a play that did both things. That’s when I settled on telling what I feel is a love story, between Mama and Christian.

AG: He’s a sort of traveling salesman and an alcoholic. Isn’t he on the wagon until that evening when she makes him drink liquor?

LN: She makes him drink, yes. That’s one of the moments that I found later in the writing. I do think that in war people are forced to make compromised, difficult choices. That moment with Christian in the bar is the kind of complicated moral dilemma that people on a day-to-day basis face in war zones like the Congo. You might see it as an act of cruelty, but is it purely an act of cruelty? Or is she saving him and herself from a worse fate by forcing him to have a drink, even though it ultimately compromises his sobriety, something he’s worked for years to protect and holds onto very dearly? I wanted to ask that very complicated question. How far are we willing to go to survive?

AG: What is the play about for you?

LN: The love story is a key element, but the play is also about the complexity of war and the way war brutalizes women, who are the least responsible for it. Mama sees herself as saving women who have no options. In her view, if she did not provide a home for these women, they would be forced to beg in the street, or they would be back in the bush, being raped time and again. As she perceives it, she’s giving them an option to choose how their bodies are to be used. “You will no longer be taken without me being paid for it.” She sees it as an act of defiance. But like Mother Courage, she’s also exploiting the situation and doing something that, in some respects, is horrific.

AG: Does the play have a positive ending from your point of view?

LN: I think it has an optimistic ending. I do think Mama evolves. And she does ultimately commit acts of generosity. She does try and do the right thing. I think that she will give it a go with Christian, though the relationship probably won’t work, and she will be back where she started. But at least she now has the capacity to love and will allow herself to love herself. And once she loves herself, she will be able to love and take care of those women better. As long as she hates herself, she is going to punish every woman that walks through that door. And in some respects that’s finally what the play is about. It’s about how you heal this wound that has stripped you of your dignity.

AG: Are there playwrights in East Africa at this point?

LN: For a long time, in Kenya, there was a healthy theatre tradition, but the theatre was dominated by Western plays. There hasn’t been a long tradition in Uganda, Kenya, and Tanzania of plays that were written in indigenous languages about African people. But it’s beginning to grow. There’s recognition on the part of artists that there needs to be an indigenous theatre literature. West Africa doesn’t have that situation, because there you do have a long-standing theatrical tradition. And there’s a whole, rich complicated literature that’s been flourishing in the Congo for years. But that’s not the case in East Africa.

AG: Is there one city or town that’s more of a theatre center than another?

LN: In Uganda it’s Kampala, and in Kenya it’s Nairobi. It’s anywhere there’s a big university that has a stage.

AG: What language are they writing in?

LN: Well, this becomes the question: Do they write in English or in their indigenous language or do they write in Swahili? In some cases they use a combination. In Kampala, I went to a nightclub and saw sketch comedy, and half the skits were in English and the other half in Luganda, the language spoken by the largest tribe in Uganda. Half of the time, I was laughing and enjoying and half of the time I was just nodding to the rhythm of the language. There are so many tribes, that if you want to reach a large audience you have to write in English. But if you want to reach your particular audience, you have to write in your own language. It’s much more complicated than the choices and decisions we have to make as American playwrights. In Kenya, for instance, do you write in Kikuyu, in Swahili, in English? There are over forty tribes. That’s forty languages. If you’re trying to create a national identity through theatre, which language do you embrace? It’s easier in Tanzania, because there the national language is Swahili.

AG: Did you talk to men, to the fighters?

LN: I did speak to men. When I was in Uganda I did go north, and I spoke to men who had fought with the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) and were guilty of committing atrocities. Some of them freely talked about it, but all of them displaced the blame, which to a certain extent I did understand: once you put on your uniform, you cease to be an individual; you become whatever that body is. As long you are wearing that uniform, you are able to commit all kinds of atrocities that you would not as an individual. So when I was talking with these soldiers, they were speaking to me as individuals so that they could disassociate from the acts they had committed. It was like, ‘I didn’t do this. The Lord’s Resistance Army made me do this; not me, but them.’ In those terms, they would talk about what they ‘were made to do,’ which was to rape, and to kidnap and kill children. I was shocked by how dispassionate, how distanced, some of the people were from the acts they had committed.

AG: Who is the most frightening character in RUINED?

LN: For me, it’s the commander. He’s supposed to be the voice of the government, he’s supposed to bring law and order, yet he chooses not to do it the right way. He’s the most empowered person.

AG: Are there rape camps in the Congo, as there were in Bosnia?

LN: The level of rape is worse than in Bosnia. Rape has become so systematic, it’s almost expected, and it’s done with complete and absolute impunity. I feel that, in Bosnia, those soldiers still understood that what they were doing was wrong. I feel that in the Congo they no longer think it’s wrong. My husband was in Goma last year, and he says there are huge billboards with signage that says, ‘don’t rape.’ The billboards have images of a woman running away and a guy opening his pants. That’s how epidemic it has become in that society. It’s beyond comprehension. I think this couldn’t happen if there wasn’t a fundamental disrespect, that women are considered to be subhuman by these men. And the culture is giving them license. It’s not these individual men but the culture that is corrupt. However, the corruption began with King Leopold and the way in which he introduced a certain level of brutality to the Congo. That brutality was allowed to fester and grow. The Belgians eventually pulled out, but that wound was still open. And the techniques that had been taught were so entrenched, that they are going to take generations to be eradicated.

AG: You once worked for Amnesty International, shortly after you graduated from Yale School of Drama. Was that the beginning of your political activism?

LN: No, it goes back further. My mother was a feminist and always politically active and aware. I remember, from the time I was young, walking on picket lines and boycotting and protesting. I remember boycotting a Rolling Stones album because of the song “Some Girls” and the way the black women were portrayed. My mother was like, ‘You can never listen to the Rolling Stones again.’ So I think I was bred to be political, although I’m not as outspoken as my mother was. But I’m from a different generation. There was an urgency to what she was doing that I feel is not quite the same for my generation. In 1960 she rode down to Mississippi during the Freedom Rides and was trying to change legislation that effectively kept us separate. In the 1970s she was a feminist trying to change legislation that oppressed women. That level of urgency has been removed. Those levels of racism and sexism are no longer legislated. People may not necessarily be enacting the legislation, but it’s on the books.

AG: I noticed on your Web site that you support an organization called Madre. Could you talk about that?

LN: I came to Madre indirectly. I’d received a Guggenheim to go Africa and I was doing interviews with empowered women, because I was looking for Mama Nadi. I had read an article about an all-women’s village in Northern Kenya called Umoja, in the Samburu region. I sought it out, I took my whole family, and we spent an entire day with the chief of the village, Rebecca Lolosoli, an amazing woman whom I believe will win the Nobel Prize one day. She had been abused by her husband and forced to flee into the bush. And she thought, ‘Well, where am I to go? I’ve been rejected by my village, and there are no options for me in this region.’ She encountered another woman, and they decided to band together, because together they could survive. Slowly the numbers of women began to grow, and they established this village called Umoja – a very traditional village that still practices the pastoral traditions of the Samburu and began absorbing women who were fleeing abusive husbands and women who in some cases had been raped by British soldiers stationed right next to them.

When women occasionally wandered away from their villages, they would be raped by the soldiers, in some cases producing biracial children who would be rejected by the villages. These women had no place to go. So Rebecca began to absorb these women. Women who don’t want their daughters to have clitorectomies could have their daughters flee to this village. It’s grown to about fifty.

This is a funny story. It’s like a Masai village. They take care of cattle. They are pastoral people. They make intricate beaded jewelry, which they sell to tourists. But they have a lot of trouble getting tour guides to bring tourists to the village, because it’s not considered to be an authentic Samburu village, because it’s all women. I visited one of the male villages around, and they said, ‘Oh, no, it’s not a Samburu village.’ They said, ‘The man is the head, and the woman is the neck that supports the head. And how can you have a village that has no head? We can’t recognize this village.’ And I asked, ‘Well how do you feel about Rebecca?” And they said, “Oh, she’s a very great chief.” They despise the village, but they respect this woman. She has built the only school in these villages, and now all these villages – these compounds, really – send their children to her school.

Anyway, Rebecca said, ‘Write down your address, and maybe I’ll come see you in America.’ And I said, ‘Okay, yeah, yeah.’ Maybe three months later the phone rings. I hear ‘Hello?’ I say, ‘Yes?’ She says, ‘This is Rebecca.’ I say, ‘Who?’ ‘This is Rebecca Lolosoli. I’m here in New York.’ I said, ‘Okay. I’ll come and get you.’

And she came. We were having a block party that day, on the street where I live in Brooklyn, and she was traveling with another indigenous woman, a Masai woman, and I think she had the best time she ever had. We had a keg, and people were drinking beer, and there was music and a barbecue. And she was like, ‘America is great.’ And I said, ‘This is not typical. Don’t be fooled, it’s not communal like this.’ However, I was so moved. She had taken off all her traditional beads, because she said everyone had been staring at her. But at the party she said she wished she had left them on, because, she said, ‘Now that I’m here, I want to share my culture and I feel much stronger. When I was on 42nd Street, I just couldn’t stand to be stared at.’

AG: Did she go back to Africa?

LN: She went back. I’m getting to Madre. Madre had brought her over and sponsored her, and I said that I wanted to send something back to her village, for the school and the kids, but I didn’t know how to do it in a formalized way. And she said, ‘Well, contact Madre.’ I’m part of this African-American mother-daughter group, and we raised $2,000 worth of school supplies and we sent them to Madre, and they got them. And I was really impressed by how quickly it happened. With Madre, because it’s so small and so grass-roots, I know the material is going to the villages they say it’s going to. Madre is one of the few advocacy groups that are really involved on the ground, doing something tangible and action-oriented, rather than abstract. Now I know that all those kids have book bags, because we sent them. I know all those kids have paper and pencils, because we sent them. And that’s why Madre is there.

AG: You are combining activism and playwriting.

LN: They are two passions. I feel it’s my social responsibility to shine a light on areas that don’t get seen. My personal feeling is that it’s an artist’s responsibility to be engaged with the culture. And when the culture is going through turmoil, I think an artist can’t ignore that. I don’t feel that every artist has to be politically engaged, but I can’t imagine that you can be an active participant of this culture and not in some way reflect that in the work you are creating.

AG: Thank you.

Alexis Greene is a New York-based author and editor. This interview was first published in the 2008 edition of ROUNDUP, the magazine of the League of Professional Theatre Women.

When you attend your performance at New York City Center, take a moment to look at the photographic display of women interviewed by Lynn Nottage for Ruined.