hello and welcome or welcome back to another episode of the solicia show and black hair and the big leagues you guys oh my goodness when I tell you the joy the joy in my spirit because I get to talk to somebody who I have looked up to for a while so let me introduce to you she is a producer installation artist screenwriter but for real a re award-winning playwright with shows including sweat Clyde's MJ the musical her work has been done all over the world I studied her in college uh Intimate Apparel ruined Crumbs from the table of Joy that's just to name a few did you know that she also wrote the book for the musical that premiered Off Broadway The Secret Life of Bees a producer on TV shows like she's got to have it and on films like what we do next take over the notorious Mr bout she has a production company she's received the pitz Pitzer prize for drama twice the only woman to do that she got her undergrad from Brown her master's from Yale and is an associate produ professor at Colombia she was in Time magazine's 100 most influential people in 2019 there are at least 17 other plays of hers that I have not mentioned she has too many awards to list she has too many awards to list but a few include multiple Obi Awards Drama Desk Awards Lucille lortell Awards the list does not end she is incredible y'all put your hands together and help me welcome the one the only ly NY thank you for that introduction I certainly hope I can live up to it but I'm always happy to talk about art and hair live up to it you did the work you did you did that I'm so excited to talk to you today how are you how's your heart today right now how you doing my heart is really good today I had a a fabulous summer I was able to do all the RNR necessary to restore the heart and to restore the spirit so I'm entering September with um with um a full well and and you know ready to just make my my art and teach and do the things that I love oh Amen to that we love a spirit of abundance when you feel full then you can fill into other people's cups and it sounds like that's what you've done a little bit of um I'd love to ask you just starting out about a little bit about your writing process cuz you've been doing this thing for a minute okay can you think way back what was the moment you thought I can make a living as a writer that you know that's such a a good question because I really do think it takes a long time to get to that point I began writing plays when I was in college I continued to write in graduate school um but after I graduated from graduate school I wasn't entirely sure that I could call out a living in this profession because the landscape was quite different than it was um it was quite different back then than it is now but I really do believe in manifestation and I think the moment that I realized I could make an in a living in this inory is when I said I want to make a living in this industry and I literally just put it out into the universe because I'd been writing and I was having um some degree of success but still it wasn't enough for me to K quit my day job still it wasn't enough for me to like put both feet into the water and say I'm just going to swim across this great vast ocean right and Conquer it and so I think it was really putting it in the universe that I wanted to be rewarded for the work that I was doing that I didn't want to just continue to have to self self subsidized in order to do the things that I loved that's it how if you could guess toate and it's okay if you're like I have no idea sish how many plays had you written into that journey of I'm deciding I'm going to make a living doing you know I mean my my journey has been so securious and so it's really hard to say just exactly how many plays because I'd had a few professionally produced plays and you know on the outside it looked like oh you have kind of arrived but I still wasn't making a living yeah know you get one play produced and you know I can give by way of example I remember doing a show called fabulation at playwrights Horizons which was a wonderful production with Incredible actors extremely successful um a play that still gets done but my paycheck at the end of each wake was $127 oh my gosh oh my gosh got you know at the top of it like a small commission which you know at the time probably was $2 or $3,000 but that you know that's not enough to be sustainable in New York City and so that's just the reality of it I mean things have changed the economics have changed ticket prices are higher you know play rights are getting more money up up front because people understand the labor that goes into making a play even before the first day of rehearsal yes right so much goes into it and I just kind of feel like that's kind of like the Arts in general it's like I have some friends who are Broadway Stars show after show after show and they're like listen I'm over here just trying to go grocery shopping and pay my bills how how is that possible it's like on the outside it really does look like oh yes I have arrived but like the money needs to money because it's we're you're in an arena of being like in the Olympics of your field so that right but you know the reality about art and and Theater and visual arts is that you it's it's feast or famine they moments of true abundance and then they're moments in which you struggle greatly to succeed and it's between those moments of of feast and famine that really determines what kind of artist you're going to be it's like how do you resurrect your spirit on a daily basis you know how do you lean in to um the joy of cre creting when you know that sometimes you won't be rewarded or recognized for it but that's part of the discipline and the and and part of the art of being an artist is keeping the spirit booing thank you you're speaking to my spirit more than you even know that you are right now um what is your writing process like how do you start how do you finish how do you like if you are embarking on something new is there a process for you is it different each time you know I remember asking this years ago as like a baby writer um August Wilson this question it's like well what where do you begin as a writer and what is your practice and you know and he was really cryptic in that wonderful way that he could be he said you know a writer writes and I thought huh okay let me go home and unpack that when I got home what I realized is that he was talking about the fact that you just have to do it and that you don't have to put rules around it you just have to on a PR pretty regular basis whether it be every day or whether it be every other day just sit down and put your thoughts to paper and it doesn't always have to be leading towards something it could be just like right now I want to dream on the page or right now I just want to draw um write the word circle on on the page but it's like the the act of writing I think invites more writing yeah yeah and um my process also just to answer your question really began to change after had children because before tell me more you know I was like a binge writer it's like I wrote whenever it's like I could get up and two in the morning and I could write until 6 and then I could sleep for for a little while or you know I could write all weekend and then when I had a child I realized that I my time was really precious and if I was going to accomplish anything that I really had to figure out a way to write around child care and so I began writing from 9 to 2 and that became my routine but just really being very precious about protecting that time because I knew I only had five days from 9 to two in the week to write and I think that that discipline has just continued even though you know my my daughter is 26 and my son is 15 I think that I still think of 9 to2 as my protected writing time when and even if I'm not writing huh 26 and 15 yes did you expect the second one well you know the second the little the little one is adopted so he was very expected and he was very planned oh that's that's awesome my best friend she has three natural born children and she adopted one as well and she really lovely that is really lovely okay wait so this is very inspiring and very encouraging and you know I came into this thinking I cannot wait to talk to Lyn noage but I didn't realize that you were going to educate me and speak into my life already and I know we're not even scratching the surface and I won't keep you long but I still have a lot of more questions okay where do you like to write do you have a spot yeah it's I I actually have a dedicated spot and I'm sitting in it right now which is my office which at various times has been my son's room has been my office has been storage space but right now have reclaimed it because I just love the way the sunshine comes in and it just I know that I have created things um that have given me real joy and pleasure in this room and so this is my writing space I've reclaimed it and I like the poster behind you yeah the poster from Crumbs from table of Joy this is one of the first Productions that was directed by seret Scott and I love the production and uh love that for your um for your ideas for because you've written so many shows how do you get your ideas where did they come from you know ideas come in many different ways I I think I've had ideas that have come to me because I've been reading and I find the paragraph in a history book that just taunts me and I think to myself it's like I need to know more about this individ ual and that um seeking out leads to a play um I've written plays um because I've read a newspaper headline and I've been incredibly frustrated I thought why don't I know more about what's going on in the Democratic Republic of Congo and why are women being um targeted for gender specific human rights abuses and why isn't it in the newspaper and that becomes a journey that then leads to a play there sometimes you know I just begin writing something and um I can't stop and I'm like oh it's a fabulation it's it's fun and it's silly and I don't need to do any research but I'm just like inside of this character in ways that are um delighting me and challenging me so I mean it's really I don't have any formula I'm I'm kind of freelance in that way do these characters come like do they speak to you are they purely from your imagination is it like like you bring these life into the do you understand what I'm like asking right now like when you're writing a character do you know who he or she or they are before they hit the page do they does it be do they become known to you as you're writing does that make any sense that's such a great question and I'm of two minds with regards to the answer to that I think sometimes I know the character very well you know that character has been speaking to me in one form or another for for quite some time and um they're kind of demanding to be on the page and those are sort of wonderful hauntings in which you're traveling with someone and you feel like I just got to get this down but sometimes I don't know the person at all and the act of writing is an act of Discovery and that's also equally as wonderful as when you're trying to find someone out on the page and often you know I find when I'm completely blocked as a writer that it's because I don't know enough about my character like I haven't made certain decisions or certain aspects of that character haven't revealed themselves to me which means I have to spend more time ruminating and researching and thinking about who they are yeah because inevitably if I'm blocked it's because there's some information I don't have access to oh interesting right okay when you started winning Awards and getting like recognized did that change your process did that change did that change like any of the way you approach your art did it change anything at all you know yeah of course it changes um everything because suddenly you have a spotlight shining on you in ways that never before I mean I sort of toiled in obscurity for really long time but I think that because the accolades came to me when I was older and I'd had this life and I'd been through so many ups and downs that I was at a point where I was ready to receive it but I was also at a point where I am who I am yeah and those things really aren't going to change me I know that when you get that kind of um recognition when you're young and you're still in the process of developing your voice and you're still trying to figure out how do I navigate this world it can be quite challenging because you still want to maintain who you are but you also not quite sure who you are because you're being told many different things when I um began sort of winning Awards I was on the other side of of that and so I felt like there was a freedom to continue to invest in who I was and what my voice was um did I read somewhere that you were once on a path to journalism but you chose is true what is that um can you one quick sec uhuh I just have to my son has an aidon disappointment and to come so please your question yes absolutely I um you were on did I read you were once on a path to journalism but you ended up choosing theater yeah I mean that's definitely true I I think that many of my summer jobs and my side jobs when I was in college and graduate school was working for small newspapers I worked for a small newspaper called The Phoenix which was kind of famous in Brooklyn it was an independent um paper then the Villager which was a small newspaper in the village which was um the alternative to the Village Voice not quite as hip but much more locally but much more locally um focused and I really loved working uh at both of those newspapers and so when I graduated from college I I toyed with the possibility of going to journalism school and being a reporter H but at the same time theater was calling me and I was really fortunate to get into both Columbia School of Journalism and the old school of drama and someone said you know the old school of drama is much more difficult to get into and that was the so they they're they're like this opportunity may not come around again and so I'm like okay I'll take this path I can always go back to journalism and I also knew that when I was in graduate school I could also continue to go back and work for the newspaper that I had been working for so it wasn't like I was cutting off a a limb I knew that there was a possibility that I could do both things she said I only do I maybe she's smart you are smart I don't know I don't know about all that these are not hunky dunk po dunk middle of nowhere schools like these are like bombs I'm that is incred so that was the Tipping Point for you they were like this one's harder this one's harder to get into but I don't mean it to sound that way but it just is that it's it's it's it was really you know I was and this is a fact when I graduated from the old school of drama and playwriting I was only the second black woman to go through the writing program there and we happened to be there at the same time I mean this you know the industry was really different and the you know the ways in which we were invited into the uh industry were quite complicated and very different so when I got the acceptance I thought oh perhaps there is a pathway perhaps there's a way to penetrate an industry that hadn't been terribly inviting particularly to black women you know regardless of whether it was white theater or it was black theater you know they just were in a lot of spaces being carved out for us wow that is such a trailblazing mindset it's it can be easy to see something that you're like well I people like me have not penetrated this space before so maybe it's not for me and your mind said there's an opportunity here right there is an opportunity here and I felt in journalism yes there was an opportunity and I could take that path but there were more people taking that path than were taking it have you ever School of drama so that's really what I meant that it was harder to get into yeah have you ever like wanted to be like like an actor or like in front of the C in front of the camera like has that ever appealed to you yeah not not really I would describe myself as an introvert extrovert and there's part of me that really enjoys and relishes the Solitude of sitting alone and writing and being with my characters and dreaming and you know creating these worlds but there's also a little part of me that enjoys the collaborative aspect of playwriting where I get to dream with other people and build things but there's not a part of me that desires to be on that stage it's like I love being in the darkness and watching people embodying the characters that I create I love to see you know how they expend my my own um um dreams up there on the stage okay so when you're writing a character do you think about do you ever think about what they look like like their hair for the character or would you ever like meet an actor first and then kind of design something around the actor like what how does your process I my process works in in both ways I certainly when I'm writing the character it's really important me to have a really Vivid picture of who they are and you know in the old days I used to find images of my characters and then post them in front of me so I could look at them and it was a real short shorthand now I can hold those images more completely in my head than I used to be able to do but also that said that sometimes I hear some someone's voice my head like when I was writing Intimate Apparel it's like I heard Viola Davis's voice in my head and I thought I could only dream one day that she would play this role but there was something about you know the strength and vulnerability that she's able to marry um within one moment that I thought is what I wanted to capture and so when I was sitting down to write the character of Esther in Intimate Apparel I thought is the voice and her voice kept coming back to me I'd love to talk a little bit about your own hair Journey you've got these gorgeous locks have you always had locks how did how did it start how's it going when you were little or wherever you'd like to start yeah I came out of the womb with like little lock no that is so not true you know I always had a really full head of hair that was challenging to my mother and my grandmother and my relatives because I was super tender-headed and anytime someone would put a finger on it it would be like ow touch it but it was also really you know it's it's funny you should ask that it's like I had a mother who always from the time I was young wore an afro she was like there are no chemicals that are ever going to touch this hair you know and I grew up you know in the midst of of black power and so she's she's like I'm just GNA have this fro and granted it wasn't like a beautiful Angela Davis fro it was just like Thro that looks like she rolled out the bed and ran her fingers through it and whatever it was it was okay we love you know I used to say please comb that afro and she's like no it's beautiful at as it is and you know looking at the picture she was so right and then I had a grandmother who was very prim and proper who I believe sported like one of the first weaves I ever had ever seen wait okay this was your mom's mom my mother's mother and I still remember her at the dinner table you know with this long hair and I'm like wow when did her hair get so long and then lifting up the back and showing us the sewn in tracks I'm like what is that and she said it's a weave and we're all like wow we've never seen anything like that but this was like eons ago I mean it was before it became standard she literally was the first person I ever saw but all that said because I had a mother who you know wore a Tatty afro forever um and we often look to our mothers to shape our Beauty sensibilities I wore Tedy afro as I joke we love like five years too long not five years too long but five years but also it came back five years after I got rid of it so it was like I you know so there was a five-year period when my taddy afri wasn't in fashion because it went out of fashion and then it came back in fashion but I I but how did you feel about it um you know I always love my natural hair and I only put chemicals in my hair twice in my life and and I was thinking on this and both of them were transitional moments in which you feel very sort of vulnerable and judged by the culture and um insecure in your own body and one was in sixth grade when you're going into middle school and I thought oh maybe I should straighten my hair and I went and I got my my hair straightened and that lasted for like a year um and then the second time was when I was going into college I put chemicals in my hair and I thought oh what was that about both of them were transitional moments where it's like okay maybe I need to conform a little bit maybe I need to make choices that are um going to be sort of more acceptable in the mainstream and in college it lasted a year and then I was back to my Afro interesting I and you as no no you go keep please keep going you know and you asked about the locks and how the locks came about and the locks came about um after I started um a full-time job and I had to get up at 9:00 every morning and I had to be presentable to the world and I have to interface with people not just in the workplace but beyond the workplace and um I thought oh this is taking so much time to maintain I just need a hairstyle where I can get up and go and go and um so I decided to lock my hair which was now maybe 35 years ago no that's not long that long yeah like it was yeah 32 years ago shut up right now why am I so shook I'm over here trying to do the math of how old I think you might be and we don't have to talk about about it I just know that black don't crack that's all I know that's all I know that's all I know that is incredible were you nervous at first or you're like is there going back after this or is this permanent like were you confident in locking it like you know I well I knew it wasn't permanent I knew that any time if it wasn't working but there's always that moment when you're first locking and you're trying to get the the here to behave and it's doing whatever it was and people are like what's going on up there and you're like trust me you know something will be going on very shortly something going on um right right now but I mean you know it's interesting because when I began locking my hair there weren't a lot of um folks out there in the mainstream who were doing it I do remember that there was quite a bit of resistance and and I felt you know the judgmental eyes um of of some people who just didn't understand you know it's like are you are you Rasta or you know is this religious it's like why are you doing it but it just felt like it was the right path for me you know way right way to express who I am and how I was feeling and how I wanted the world to see me it's like I want the world to see my my hair in a style that just is organic to who I how do you keep them so neat and they just look really like like you take care of them how do you take care of them you know I just wash and style wash and twist what do you mean wash and twist you do you twist it on your own I twist it on my own I've always Twisted on my own just because I felt very sensitive about other people twisting my hair too tight or you know I don't know I just always felt like I could do the maintenance on my own better than the salons that I had gone to do the maintenance because inevitably I'd leave and there's always part of me that wanted to cry either you know the color of the die was wrong or they had Twisted it too tight and put it in a style that you know hurt my head and then I'd have a week of of pain and so I just thought I can do it is it easy for somebody who's maybe listening to this who might be considering locking their own hair and they're like I don't know what to do is it easy to like do that yourself you know what I would recommend if someone's like in the first stage of exploring whether they want their hair and locks is I would go I would go to a salon let you know let someone else start it for you okay let someone else help you maintain it because what happens is like that first six months you wash your hair and then it's like oh no I have to really re re it but they can help you get it started so that it locks great great do you tie it up at night um you know I used to tie it up at night um some I mean sometimes sometimes not nice that really does sound like Freedom Lynn like know it really is fre it's so which is why I chose this hairstyle you know because I was spending far too much time on hair maintenance it was I was making and also and here's the other thing is I was making certain choices based on my hair yeah and yes and I thought I don't want my hair to dictate how I'm going to move through this world do you think that you will stay locked forever you know I I I don't think so really no I don't I don't think so I mean and and and that said it's like there were times when I had really really short hair like right down to the scalp and I also love that freedom I love the freedom of wash and wear where you know you could feel feel the water on your head when you got up in the morning and you didn't have to do a lot you know and so you know it's the two extremes and so I toy with do I want to go back there where I just did literally nothing yeah get a haircut every once in a while oh I love that I love that um I'd like to ask you and we I'll only spend a few more minutes but who are your Inspirations oh my Inspirations oh I have so many um I have so many Inspirations I mean I think the first inspiration for me was my my mother who many ways um had such a wonderful rebellious spirit and ways that I have come to so appreciate as I get older is that she was idiosyncratic and she really was forging new territory in so many ways and I thought oh I aspire to do that you know I aspire to be adventurous in where I choose to go I Aspire you know to push back on Injustice when I see it and I and I aspire to be like a good parent and a good partner and all those things that she was so I think that that as I get older I take more and more inspiration from her because I lost her early and so I felt like there's so many questions that I didn't get to ask her but um I'm asking those questions Anyway by just interrogating who she she she was and then um yeah I mean I would say that that's my main inspiration um and obviously you are taking up space in the industry but how do you feel that theater or television or however you want to frame the industry as how do you think they're doing in terms of diversity you know there was a moment maybe three years ago maybe it was just before Co and just after um George Floyd and the cultural Reckoning and when we really had an opportunity to express our voices communally in ways that we hadn't before in the industry and push back at some of um the barriers that had been placed in front of us and it felt like there was going to suddenly be real opportunity you know you saw more women being hired more people of color being hired not just in front of the camera but behind the cam camera and in all sorts of positions but I feel like there's been a retrenching that's quite scary to me you know I think when I look purely at the theater landscape at how optimistic I was when there were people being placed in leadership roles um but then we saw two or three years later that they weren't being given the support and the tools to Ed and some of them were not able to survive you know the onslaught of of criticism and the lack of support and they disappeared but that said I mean there's still incredible reasons for optimism in theater because we do when you look across the theater landscape have people of color who are leading very important institutions which means that they're Pathways for our stories yeah you know they may not be everywhere but they're more than there were prior to um Co and so that's great but I do think we still have to be vigilant and we still have to protect our our space and we still have to push back because I think it's really easy as we know for things to slingshot I'm looking at affirmative action and the college that I went to and they were saying that this year they're 40% less black students and it just made my heart cry to think that that all this progress had been made and because of this 40% less and because of this one law suddenly you know that 40% is not going to get access to opportunity um hopefully they will get access but not to that thing that perhaps they desired oh my gosh so I think that we just have to keep our anten antennas like raised yeah and be alert and aware that we may have some opportunities now but it doesn't mean that we will have those forever and particularly for those who are my ages it's incumbent upon us to really um support the the Next Generation and to help them like slot into those positions that we have occupied um this might be an unfair question but out of all of your babies aka the things that you've written which one is your favorite oh you know that's that's impossible to I mean it's like what what's your favorite child it's like I have reasons that endear a certain plays to my heart like intimate apparel it's a play that I wrote after my mother died because I want to write something I thought she would love to see and so I always think of it as her play and when I see it I think of her and I think of my grandmother and I think of family even though it's not about those things that's what that play conjures for me so I think that that one really occupies a SP special place in my heart you know and I think about a play like ruined that really forced me to go so way outside of my personal comfort zone and to face down some of my feir fears to to go to spaces that I never would have dreamed of going to and so that also has a special place in my heart because it in it taught me a different way to make art in a way that I love making art what do you want your legacy to be um I I've been teaching for the last 20 three years it's a long time it's a really long time I began the day after 911 so I know exactly oh you know it's like I remember exactly the day I began because yeah I won't bore you with the details but I think that one of the things that if anything is I feel like my legacy is the fact that I have touched in some way so many other writers and I have um helped pave Pathways for them to success and you know I talked with my students really about invisible curation and early on I realized it was really important for us not just to um help by um being out there is that we actually had to do tangible things to help people and one of those things that I I did was try and get on panels oh so that um yeah really early on so that I could help select people whose work might be overlooked yes I could sit on boards I can do all of these things which I call invisible curation that can help people succeed and they don't even know that they're being helped which is the best kind of help wow that's that hopefully is my legacy is that it may be invisible but it's it's there because there's so many other people out there more questions is there anything that you're working on right now that's filling your soul um yeah I have a few things that I'm I'm working on I I've been working on two operas well operas yeah operas and both with my daughter Ruby IO Gerber who's incredible um writer and poet and thinker and one is is going to Premiere next year at Opera St Louis that was composed by Ricky and Gordon who was my collaborator on Intimate Apparel the Opera and then the other one which is a commission from Lincoln Center and the Met is um called in the rush with composer Carlos Simon who's fantastic that is so awesome that are that that I that have been really fun and and different and and making different parts of my brain um excited and using different muscles in my brain and then the other thing that I've been working on that I really love is um an adaptation of imitation of life oh um with um John Legend a musical and um director leisel Tommy and it's really beautiful and I think really exciting and I think that audiences are going to be surprised by it because it really lives in ways that are very different um than other musicals I mean that it's it's weighty and it's complicated and it's a musical oh that sounds like fire I am so excited to hear more about that and I'm still I'm still shook about MJ I was not sure what to expect except that I love the music growing up and it was amazing was that your first musical no that was not your first music no it was my first musical i' done Secret Life of Bees oh yes right right right to m m MJ and I i' done like another musical called sweet Billy and the Zulus which was a CH children children's musical with the wonderful Deborah Murray you know so that's where I like dip my toes into the water I'm like can you just plunge all the way in because MJ I plunge all the way in like in the water I'm like give it to me Lynn because we love your writing we love it and and I'm like a musical like I'm I'm an actress on Broadway like that's what I so I like musicals I usually I I um uh gravitate more towards musicals than the plays which is so hilarious because of all the plays I've written yours is most of them like it's mostly your place but I'm like ly nage plus the musical world it is like it's really different it's different and it's fun and it's more challenging I'll say give us more can I say that yeah well hopefully you know Imitation of Life will be out there in the next couple of years I will be looking for it that sounds incredible Lyn noage you are so incred you're incredible and thank you for taking the time this morning and talking and sharing your insights and your knowledge and your wisdom and your spirit and I hope that you have a brilliant rest of your day and that you keep influencing people thank you and and thank you for having me and thank you for your spirit and thank you for just the opportunity to be in conversation oh my gosh what a blessing Lyn noage everybody