These Women Playwrights Are Giving Theater A Moral Compass

Playwrights Lynn Nottage, Anna Deavere Smith, and Paula Vogel, photographed at the Cort Theatre, in New York City.Photograph by Mark Schäfer.

“I wanted to write a new play,” explains the playwright at the center of Paula Vogel’s Indecent, “that posed contemporary moral questions, that forced us to face some uncomfortable truths.” Vogel’s inventive portrayal of a 20th-century Yiddish theater troupe struggling with controversial material does just that, as do Anna Deavere Smith’s Notes from the Field and Lynn Nottage’s Sweat, for which Nottage received the Pulitzer Prize in Drama.

Vanity Fair profiles the trio . three gifted artists delving into oppression and loss, giving complex voices to complex issues from America's Rust Belt to a young black man's police confrontation in Baltimore.