This season, playwright Lynn Nottage has two shows running concurrently: the play Clyde’s, which depicts formerly incarcerated workers at a small eatery (it runs in select cities through this fall) and MJ The Musical, her first Broadway play about Michael Jackson’s 1992 Dangerous World Tour.

Any other playwright would tell you they’re overwhelmed from juggling two huge projects like these. Nottage, however, said that’s business as usual.

“I think I can relate to Michael {Jackson} in the way that he just worked–his work ethic was unmatched,” she shared with Essence. “He was an uncompromising musician and a perfectionist, and the musical is very much about how that drive for perfection really weighed on him. And some of that’s recognizable.”

Nottage, much like the subject of her Tony-winning production, had been readying herself for the level of exertion it took to lead two hit works at once, among other projects.

“I feel like in some ways, my entire life has been in preparation for this,” Nottage said. “I was talking very recently with a friend who’s a lighting designer, and he comes from an immigrant family, and he was saying that he watched his parents work seven days a week just to survive. And that was just their discipline in order to feed the family and to support the next generation. And he was saying that he feels like some of that is just embedded in his DNA because that was what was modeled for him. I also think that my parents modeled that for me. My mother worked impossibly hard, my grandmother worked, you know. And I thought, ‘that’s just what one does.’”

Nottage acknowledged that that ingrained work ethic also helped her earn opportunities in the theater circuit Black women seldom received.

“Making theater is very difficult,” Nottage begins. “Making theater when you’re a Black woman is doubly difficult. At the very beginning of my career, I was often told that there wasn’t audiences for my stories that centered Black women. I was often told by literary managers or artistic directors that they, meaning white people, needed some way to access this work, which was a code for they needed a white person to be centered in the play for them to be able to enjoy it. I mean, I can go through the list of indignities I suffered through to get here. For anyone in the theater, we all know that we are truly survivors.”

Looking ahead, Nottage said she hopes her drive inspires the next generation of creators to nurture their artistic voices unabashedly.

“There’s beauty in motion,” said Nottage. “Forging forward, making progress, creating art…those are all the aspects of life that make it of value. Don’t ever stop creating.”

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