Lynn Nottage, and Luis Valdez

Arts and Social Change

Featuring playwrights Lynn Nottage and Luis Valdez

In a program co-hosted with the Arkansas Repertory Theater, two of America’s most renowned playwrights, Lynn Nottage and Luis Valdez, lead a community conversation on the role of the arts in social change. The event is presented as part of “Voices at the River,” The Rep’s new program for bringing together African American and Latino playwrights, actors and directors to create new voices in American theater. The program is narrated by Sybil Roberts Williams, Washington D.C. drama teacher. The playwrights discuss the history of African American and Latino theatre and the teaching of culture and history through the arts. They also discuss their own personal experiences that led them to a career in theatre.

Bios

Lynn Nottage

Lynn Nottage, author of Intimate Apparel and Crumbs from the Table of Joy, is one of the most produced playwrights in America. A graduate of the Yale School of Drama, she is the recipient of many awards including an Obie Award and a New York Drama Desk Award. The Wall Street Journal says she is “at the very top of the short list of America’s best contemporary playwrights.”

Luis Valdez

Luis Valdez is known as the father of the American Chicano Theater movement. He founded El Teatro Campesino, a ground-breaking workers’ theatre, in the 1960s. He wrote and directed the film La Bamba and the Broadway play, Zoot Suit. Nottage and Valdez are honorees during Arkansas Repertory Theatre’s Voices at the River, a new play development program for African American and Latino playwrights.