Jeremy O. Harris arrives at the California-via-NYC eatery Dimes in head-to-toe Thom Browne (Gucci loafers excluded). Thanks to his 6’5” frame, the voluminous culottes and grey monochrome tailoring read as chic overgrown schoolboy. It’s an intimidatingly high-concept brunch look, except that he credits it to his laxness with chores. “This morning, I hadn’t finished my laundry,” he says, “and so all I had were these four things in my closet.”

His semi-demurral is echoed by fellow playwright and Columbia theater professor Lynn Nottage—later, she’ll joke that playwrights don’t have style, but she’s her own statement’s foil, comfortably clad in an aubergine-and-burgundy jumpsuit and interlocking ceramic earrings by Eny Lee Parker. “I bought one pair, and I’m obsessed now,” she says. “I keep buying them. Also because they break.” Waiting for condiments, she jokes about another accessory she usually totes around: hot sauce. Harris is enthralled: “I love that you have two Pulitzer Prizes and you have hot sauce in your bag. That’s major.”

Each of these artists has a clear but distinct sense of style, and it’s the same with their playwriting success: Both have achieved renown in an industry that has traditionally excluded black narratives—so much so that Harris explains that he’s compiling a list of every play with a black author that has ever been on Broadway.

Harris and Nottage would both be on that brief list. Harris’s Slave Play is, according to various accounts, miraculous, confounding, offensive, genre-exploding. Too much description would betray its story, but its portrayal of trauma’s effects on three interracial couples has earned critical praise and famous fans. (Harris wrote and appears in a new show based on the late black writer Gary Fisher, Black Exhibition, just beginning its run at The Bushwick Starr.) Nottage’s heavily researched exploration of a failing industrial town, Sweat, came to Broadway in 2017; according to the New York Times, it hurtled toward an explosive denouement between working-class barflies with “the awful inevitability of Greek tragedy.”

This is a pair that brings little-examined stories into the rarefied space of the theater and orchestrate devastating clashes of identity, history, and the present. Here are two people who speak to their audiences frankly and insistently, now speaking with each other for Vogue: What follows is edited excerpts of that conversation.