Lynn Nottage: I’m very interested as a whole in morally ambiguous characters. And at the center of Ruined is a woman named Mama Nadi who runs a brothel in the Ituri Rainforest. She at once provides refuge to women who have been victims of gender‑specific human rights abuses, but she also exploits them. So I was really interested in that conundrum of someone who is at once sort of savior and exploiter. I think that Mama Nadi would describe herself as someone who understood that in order to save these women, she had to make some compromised choices, and I was interested in that compromised choice and the complexity of that. One of the phrases that I held onto when I was interviewing these women, was “sustain the complexity of the situation.” It’s really easy for us to condemn someone like Mama Nadi without understanding the difficulty of surviving in a war like the one that was raging in the entire Ituri Rainforest. It’s really easy for us to be judgmental without understanding the complexities of what it took to survive in that situation.