Introduction: Lynn Nottage’s 2009 Pulitzer Prize-winning play Ruined has been read in the past for its commentary on postcolonialism and how it subverts abuse tropes. Additionally, Nottage herself has noted that characters in the play were meant to symbolize different ideas such as Mother Courage and Mother Africa. The connection between the author’s intent and how it is read is hard to ignore as a reader. That being said, there appears to be a lack of scholarship concerned with what’s going on in the setting of the play outside the walls of Mama Nadi’s bar/brothel. After connecting the setting outside the walls of the play that appears on the stage, a different reading of the play can be done that connects what other scholars have said about the play and what Nottage has said about it. With that connection made a reading can be done of the play that helps place it into a broader literary canon. In the instance of Ruined, it could be placed into a branch of ecofeminist literacy, just not in its most obvious form. In Ruined, Lynn Nottage uses ecofeminist literary tropes to tie together women’s suffering with the land they inhabit and by doing so she is able to recenter both nature and women with the respect they deserve.