With 'Mlima's Tale,' Lynn Nottage Has Found Her Light

The horrors of the ivory trade may feel like an unexpected topic for the playwright's newest work — and that's exactly how she likes it.

John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation

Two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Lynn Nottage is a theater genius and one of the coolest playwrights around. Through plays like Drama Desk nominee "By The Way, Meet Vera Stark" and Drama Desk and Tony nominee "Sweat," she has developed a body of work that is timely and uniquely her own. Nottage’s work is unapologetically bold and reflective of the diversity of her world. She is funny and serious, quirky and thoughtful, and both brilliant and intentional.

Her new work, "Mlima’s Tale," currently running at the Public Theater in New York, is the haunting ghost story of a magnificent elephant trapped in the clandestine international ivory market. The play begins in Africa with the poaching of Mlima the elephant (played by Sahr Ngaujah). The ghost of Mlima then follows the tusks through several illegal sales and transfers, haunting all who participate in his exploitation. The play draws audiences into the horrific realities of consumerism by way of beautiful dramaturgy delivered by talented actors.

As with Nottage’s other work, the theater community is taking note of "Mlima." Sahr Ngaujah was nominated for a Drama League Award for Distinguished Performance for his performance. "Mlima’s Tale" is also nominated in three categories for the Outer Critics Circle (OCC) Awards: Outstanding New Off-Broadway Play, Outstanding Lighting Design, and Outstanding Sound Design.

"Mlima’s Tale" is a piece of excellence that brings a much-needed dialogue to the exploitation of the African diaspora and our collective ability to wreck or save our planet from consumption. In my conversation with Nottage, we not only tackle the horror of the ivory trade, but also strategies for black women writers and what it means to "step into the light" of who you are.

Jamara Wakefield: Congratulations on returning to the Public with "Mlima’s Tale." It was riveting, and I love a good ghost story. What were your intentions for this new work?

Lynn Nottage: The intention was to create a play about the environment and about elephants that are in jeopardy. I wanted to create a play that had a slightly larger resonance. The African continent continues to be exploited for natural resources and I hoped to create a play that exposed that. In terms of theater production, I wanted to tell this story in a way that was unabashedly theatrical. So often when we go to theater today, we sit down and lights come up on a very beautiful living room or a kitchen and it looks very much like TV. [But] I want audiences to have an experience that could only be had in that theater space.

JW: What played into your choice to use a black actor to play Mlima?

LN: We were very specific in selecting a black body because of the story that we wanted to tell about exploitation of the [continent]. I don't think it would resonate in the same way if we used an Asian man, or a white man to tell that story.

JW: As a black person, seeing a black actor’s body be poached and consumed made the performance even more haunting and personally painful for me.

The African continent continues to be exploited for natural resources.

LN: Chris, [our] choreographer, was very specifically looking for movements that resonate with the Atlantic slave trade to use as Mlima moves through his journey. Some of the stances that Sahr takes at the end when he's being fetishized —when Mlima is being fetishized— are classical Renaissance stances [seen in] European black statues. We wanted that.

JW: The theme of complicity is powerful in this story. Can you talk to me about that as it connects with the staging of the play?

LN: Most of the scenes are duets [and] the power dynamic slowly shifts in the course of the telling of the story. So one person goes from being the exploiter to the exploited; it moves that way up the economic food chain until you literally land in a high-rise owned by someone [who has exploited] Mlima.

Initially when I was thinking about how to show the haunting throughout the play, I had this image in my head of Butoh (舞踏) dance. [It’s a dance] sort of developed in response to the drama that Japanese people experienced through Hiroshima and the war. I thought, what if when Mlima becomes the elephant she covers the stage with dust, so by the time the play ends the entire stage is a covered in dust and everyone has to sort of wade through it and is left with residue? For a number of very practical reasons we could not execute that. [laughs]

JW: Yes, the production team would have been like, "Excuse me?" [laughs]

LN: Right. So we experimented with other ways of transformation. The way that we landed is that white paint gets left on everyone who is complicit in the ivory trade, and so people essentially wear that mark through the entire scenes and into the next scenes.

The white marks Nottage mentions are clear on her lead actor’s body.
The Public Theatre

JW: From the audience, the consistency of the white marks makes it feels as though you’re in this downward spiral where there's no way out the complicity of the ivory trade, and no way out of the greed.

LN: As an artist I feel my job is really to be the question asker, not the answer. We elect officials, we have politicians and activists and people who step in to fill [the answer] gaps, but I wanted to raise the question, so that people can choose to do whatever they feel necessary to stop the ivory trade. For some people it's to remove the ivory in their house, but for others it's just to be much more aware of the way in which animals are being exploited for our desire.

JW: I’m curious how you maintain your voice as a writer who tackles such diverse topics in her work. I know as a writer I often feel like if I write about race, now I become the writer who writes about race, you know what I mean? But I also recognize that I'm more complicated than that. As black women, we are multidimensional — we aren't single issue beings.

LN: I hear you. I think it's really easy for people to compartmentalize us based on the last thing we've done. It's convenient, and as a species we tend to be quite, quite lazy in that regard. Rather than seeing the totality of a person, we like to look [at] the parts that are familiar or fit into our notions of who that person should be. And I think it's certainly true of artists. I feel like as artist[s] we are constantly trying to push up against that box.

[But,] I think that I've had some longevity because you can't anticipate where I will go next. And I like that freedom. I can be fluid as a creative artist.

JW: Absolutely. So if that's the case, and you're open to exploring what you want to explore and letting audiences be surprised, how are you defining success for yourself? There's a risk to being fully yourself, right? Because your audience may understand the work you’re putting in front of them, but they also might not if it’s not what they "expect" from you.

I think I've had some longevity because you can't anticipate where I will go next.

LN: I teach graduate writing and I've done so for the last 17 years. So I spend a lot of time in dialogue with young artists who are constantly worried about how they're going to make a living in this business. One thing that I can say — and I do mean this 100 percent — is that on some level audiences recognize when the creator, the artist, is being authentic and truthful. [The] work can be completely untidy, but if the message inside the work is conveyed in a way that somehow touches people truthfully, then I honestly think that work is going to have a degree of success. That's what I lean into as an artist and how I gauge whether I am successful in my endeavor: Whether I feel I'm being honest to the characters that I'm exploring and whether I'm being honest to myself about the way in which I want to tell the story. Sometimes I grapple with that because we do have this impulse to pander and to meet the audience where they are. But I think that as theater artists we have to be those risk takers.

JW: Have you thought about who in your audiences your work holds space for?

LN: Well, hopefully my work holds space for other African American writers. Part of the reason I became a playwright is because I wanted to amplify the stories that I heard my mother tell and my grandmother tell, stories that really sort of died around the kitchen table. I felt like [they were] too good for them not to live in a much larger space. My grandmother was the most epic storyteller I've ever encountered. I mean, she was a great raconteur and it just breaks my heart that she never had a larger platform to share her stories. I've done my best to hold on to those stories and eventually I will tell them, but I know that I could never tell them in the way that she did.

JW: What has theater taught you?

LN: I do believe that we can have many journeys and that playwriting is not my end-game. I didn't enter into making theater with an assumption that it would teach me something, I entered because it's what I love to do. But I think one of the joys of being a theater-maker is that it's a very communal art form.

You get to very quickly form a family that has one mission, which is to put on a show and do it as beautifully and clearly as possible. Those bonds are very tight because you're so interdependent on each other for a short period of time. It has really taught me to trust others, and to surrender some control and to allow others into my process.

JW: One final question. Considering all that you've achieved, what advice might you give your younger self?

LN: I feel that I'm someone who found their voice later in life. I was crippled by anxiety for so long and that anxiety really informed decisions that I made, and I felt as though I hid away. And I would tell my younger self to step into the light, and seize the power. I wish I had known that. You know, I see all these tenacious young women who are so secure in who they are, and celebrating their voices at a young age, and I wish that I had the strength to do that, and I that I had had someone to push me into the light.


This interview has been edited and condensed.

Jamara Wakefield is a poet and playwright whose work can also be found on Broadway World. Follow her on Twitter @JamaraNYC.

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