OSF Stalwart Lynn Nottage Locked Herself in a Lincoln Center Bathroom Yesterday
Lynn Nottage, author of Ruined and Sweat
Image: Courtesy David Shankbone
If they handed out Pulitzer prizes for unlocking the bathroom door at Lincoln Center, Lynn Nottage would have at least three Pulitzer prizes.
Yesterday afternoon, Nottage—a decorated Brooklyn playwright whose Pulitzer-winning play Sweat premiered at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland—tweeted a cry for help from the Upper West Side:
I am locked in the bathroom at Lincoln Center. I have been banging and yelling if you see this tweet send help!
— Lynn Nottage (@Lynnbrooklyn) February 6, 2020
For a very specific corner of the internet, it amounted to a Die Hard-scale hostage crisis.
writing my play Lynn Nottage is Trapped in the Bathroom for the 2021 theatrical season
— jourdain (@jourdayen) February 6, 2020
The two most dramatic things to ever happen in a Lincoln Center bathroom pic.twitter.com/8dotdLUMvb
— Tom Zohar (@TomZohar) February 6, 2020
Thrilled to know that Lynn Nottage and I both bring our iPads to the toilet pic.twitter.com/cMfYXTlg66
— Zach Schiffman (@schlife) February 6, 2020
After 40 minutes in limbo, Nottage found her way out, and I walked up to my editor and said, "Hey, can I write about the loosely Oregon-connected playwright Lynn Nottage getting stuck in a bathroom at Lincoln Center? It was a big deal on Twitter for a sec," and he said, "As long as it doesn't take all day."
I got out of the bathroom!!!
— Lynn Nottage (@Lynnbrooklyn) February 6, 2020
I thought I might stuck for hours
— Lynn Nottage (@Lynnbrooklyn) February 6, 2020
Big ups to this guy named Evan, a Lincoln Center teacher who skulked the halls to find the only woman in history to win two Pulitzer prizes for drama. It does not look like he personally delivered her from captivity, but Nottage did tweet "Thank you xx" at him, which is its own kind of victory.
Of actual local note: Profile Theatre is in the middle of a two-season exploration of works by Nottage, her mentor Paula Vogel, and her protégé Branden Jacobs-Jenkins—they just wrapped an incredible production of Nottage's Sweat last week. It looks like the company is focusing in on Vogel and Jacbobs-Jenkins for the remainder of this season, but here's hoping Nottage turns around a draft of LOCKED in time for a staged reading come fall.
