LIVE & OUTSPOKEN
Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Lynn Nottage interviews actress/writer April Yvette Thompson
Presented by 651 ARTS, Actress/Writer April Yvette Thompson performs monologues from her riveting plays – Liberty City and Good Bread Alley – about the places where politics and history collide as seen in the personal stories of people of color. Thompson will then be joined by Pulitzer Prize winning Playwright Lynn Nottage to discuss many of the shared themes in their work, as well as their paths to becoming successful playwrights.
Lynn Nottage is a playwright from Brooklyn. Her plays include Intimate Apparel; Fabulations, or the Re-Education of Undine; Crumbs from the Table of Joy; Las Meninas; and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Ruined (2009). Her work has been produced and developed at theatres both nationally and internationally, including The Goodman Theatre, Manhattan Theatre Club, Roundabout Theatre Company, Playwrights Horizons, among many others. She is the recipient of numerous awards including the 2007 MacArthur Genius Award, an OBIE Award for playwriting, NY Drama Critics Circle Award, Best Play and Jon Gassner Outer Critics Circle awards, American Theatre Critics/Steinberg 2004 New Play Award, 2004 Francesca Primus Award, and 2 AUDELCO awards. She was awarded a 2007 Lucille Lortel Foundation Fellowship, 2005 Guggenheim Fellowship, The National Black Theatre Festival’s August Wilson Playwriting Award and the 2004 PEN/Laura Pels Award for Drama. She is a graduate of Brown University and the Yale School of Drama, where she is currently a visiting lecturer. Lynn is also a recent graduate of New Dramatists.
New York-based April Yvette Thompson has been widely recognized as a multi-talented writer and performer. Liberty City, which Thompson co-wrote with Jessica Blank, was nominated for a Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Solo Show, and earned Thompson Drama Desk, Outer Critic Circle, Broadway.com Audience, and AUDELCO nominations for Best Solo Performance. Thompson has appeared in many off-Broadway productions, including the New York premiere of The Exonerated and the world premiere of Tanya Barfield & Lynn Nottage’s The Antigone Project at The Women’s Project. A Classical Theatre of Harlem company member, Thompson has received AUDELCO nominations for her work in Medea (dir. Alfred Preisser), and Macbeth and has appeared in productions of King Lear with Paul Butler and Jean Genet’s The Blacks (dir. Christopher McElroen).
651 ARTS is a Brooklyn-based performing arts organization dedicated to supporting and celebrating the multi-faceted work of contemporary performing artists of the African Diaspora. Live & Outspoken is a new program presented by 651 ARTS that is a live performance/interview series featuring artist-to-artist interviews with innovators in contemporary dance, theater, music and literature. The series runs from April 17 through May 18 and is held at various venues throughout Brooklyn. Visit www.651arts.org for more information.