Playwright Lynn Nottage startles audiences

The Pulitzer Prize-winning drama “Ruined,” now at Arena Stage, burst into public view in 2008, a distillation of war, travel, massive suffering and some smiles that, to writer Lynn Nottage, were a revelation. The acclaimed playwright has vivid memories of interviewing refugees during her research for the play, which tells of a bar-and-brothel in the violence-scarred contemporary Democratic Republic of Congo.

Congo has long been wracked by a dizzyingly complex armed conflict that has unleashed a pandemic of rape. Several years ago, Nottage traveled to Africa to hear from women who had experienced the crisis firsthand. The dramatist, a 2007 winner of a MacArthur Fellowship (the honor sometimes termed a “genius grant”), recalls that she wanted “to examine the way in which war impacts women and to look at gender-specific human rights abuses. Because that’s one of the things I find is always lacking in examination of war: the impact it has on women and children.”

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She was hoping to fold the material into a planned reworking of Bertolt Brecht’s classic “Mother Courage and Her Children,” but that idea receded as she learned more specifics about Congo.

Her interviewees astonished her, she said.

“These women that I encountered had been through some of the most horrific things that you can possibly imagine,” she says. “[Yet] they managed to resurrect their lives and access their smiles.” Nottage — who would ultimately make three research trips to Africa — realized that her planned play would have to do justice to the continent’s intricacy and nuance.

A cut-and-dried war-is-hell script “would be the easy, simple play to write,” she says. “You show the horror, and then you end it. I felt the challenge was figuring out a way to show the full complexity of life in Africa, which is this dance between people living their lives and then suddenly being thrust into these untenable situations, and then figuring out a way to live again.”

Public opinion seems to hold that Nottage mastered the challenge with “Ruined,” which debuted in Chicago and New York, received critical raves and nabbed the Pulitzer in 2009. The dramatist’s success in this instance is, perhaps, not surprising, because complexity — the quality she was striving for in “Ruined” — characterizes her artistic output.

The 46-year-old writer, who is one of Arena Stage’s “project resident” dramatists (commissioned to write a script that the company will produce), sets her plays in vastly different eras and milieus and tailors her aesthetic to each project. For instance, the widely performed “Intimate Apparel” (2003)m which was co-premiered by Baltimore’s Center Stage and California’s South Coast Repertory, tells a quiet, bittersweet story about an African American seamstress in 1905 New York City. But a companion piece, 2004’s “Fabulation, or The Re-Education of Undine,” is an antic satire about a public relations professional in modern Manhattan.

“Crumbs from the Table of Joy” (1995) travels to 1950s Brooklyn to portray an African American family influenced by communism and by the religious leader Father Divine. “Por’knockers” (1995) is a political satire partly set in the Guyana rain forest. “Las Meninas” (2002) recounts a surreptitious romance between an African dwarf and the wife of King Louis XIV of France.