Playwright Paula Vogel is known not only for her work on Broadway, but also for the generations of famous playwrights whose careers she has nurtured. Above, Jessica Lange in Paula Vogel’s Mother plays.
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Playwright Paula Vogel is known not only for her work on Broadway, but also for the generations of famous playwrights whose careers she has nurtured. Above, Jessica Lange in Paula Vogel’s Mother plays.
Joan Marcus/Second Stage
Paula Vogel is best known to the general public for her moving and highly theatrical pieces, including How I learned to drive, Indecent and his latest work, Mother play, with Jessica Lange and nominated for several Tony Awards. But since 1984, she has taught many young playwrights – first at Brown University, then at Yale.
“I love teaching as much as I love writing,” Vogel said. “So actually over the last 40 years it’s been kind of a juggle, because I always miss the other one.”
Over the years, its alumni have won Tony Awards and Pulitzer Prizes and been produced on and off Broadway.
“I wanted my students to get to Broadway before me,” Vogel said. “I wanted my students to be produced in theater companies that I would never be produced in. And, you know, I always think of it as sort of a one-stop shop: coming in as an emerging playwright and leaving the room as a colleague. “
“One of the first things she said to me, the first day I met her, was, ‘When a door opens for you, you hold it open and let another person through.’ , said playwright Quiara Alegría Hudes, a Pulitzer Prize winner perhaps best known for writing the screenplay for. In the heights. “And that’s her. Except she actually holds the door open and hundreds of people come in. She teaches you ethics, not just the structure and style of playwriting, but the ethics of living a writer’s life, like an artist. She models that.
A lifelong mentor
“I wanted my students to get to Broadway before me,” says playwright and professor Paula Vogel.
Second step
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Second step
“I wanted my students to get to Broadway before me,” says playwright and professor Paula Vogel.
Second step
Vogel, who grew up in the Washington, D.C. area, often writes from personal – sometimes painful – experience. His escape game was The Baltimore Waltzwhich dealt with the death of his brother from AIDS.
Playwright Sarah Ruhl, a MacArthur Fellowship winner, said she studied with Vogel at a particularly vulnerable time in her life.
“I met Paula when I was 20, and my father had just died of cancer, and I was back at Brown and having a little trouble concentrating,” Ruhl said. “And Paula really understood how grief shapes an artist, and also how to help artists get out of that confusion and into their work.”
In fact, Ruhl’s escape game, Euridycesends the main character to Hades where she meets her deceased father.
When two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Lynn Nottage first met Vogel, she was considering going to journalism school and didn’t realize playwright was a career path for women.
“I was taking a playwriting seminar class, and she came in and she was still an ambitious young playwright looking to teach playwriting,” Nottage said. “And I found her warm and generous and nurturing and encouraging and really inspiring in a way that nourished my spirit.”
His former students said it wasn’t just their minds that were nourished. “She would take me to this place, Café Zog in Providence on Wickenden Street and we would have a cookie,” Ruhl said. “And, you know, she would feed her writers.”
They still meet up for an occasional cookie. Or drink.
Lynn Nottage recalled that when she and Vogel debuted on Broadway in 2017, they frequently met for drinks because they felt they weren’t getting the support from the media and Broadway community that they had. they hoped.
“So I think having an ally and a sister and someone, literally, that I could hold hands with and, you know, fight the powers that be, really emboldened me and allowed me to survive to that.”
She added that while Vogel is a kind person, she is also “a badass… she also has this side that demands to be heard and demands to be seen and is an advocate and a fighter for voices of other writers.”
“I think there are no boundaries in the classroom around the mentorship that Paula creates and fosters,” Ruhl said. “It’s for life.”
Vogel and his wife, Anne Fausto-Sterling, celebrated Ruhl’s wedding.
“I’ve actually officiated at several alumni weddings, which has become a hobby of mine,” Vogel said. “I love doing it.”
The three playwrights themselves became teachers and friends with each other. Hudes said she and Vogel shared early drafts of their pieces. “I read Mother play. And I think it’s his best piece, and I don’t say that lightly. I am impressed by all of his work.”
The birth of Mother play
Jim Parsons and Jessica Lange in Mother plays.
Jeanne Marcus
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Jeanne Marcus
Yet even as Vogel became a caring teacher and colleague, Mother play clearly shows that she own the mother was not particularly attentive.
Jessica Lange plays the fictional version. “In the play, Phyllis makes absolutely unforgivable decisions and pays the price, she lives with those consequences for the rest of her life,” Lange said.
Vogel said Mother playing had a gestation period of 40 years and it is its homage to the many maternal plays written by men. “
“When I was sitting at the table with my mother, my brother and I could quote Glass Menagerie “, make a little private joke and call it a day for dinner,” Vogel said. “But I was curious what the difference is when women write plays for their mothers.”
Installed over 40 years, her mother’s play is written with empathy and forgiveness. The public sees the difficulties this single mother goes through, with money, with alcohol, with her homosexual children, with loneliness. And all this within the context of the constraints of the times in which she lived.
“Perhaps Paula existed in a kind of resistance and rebellion toward her mother,” Lynn Nottage mused. “You think about the path that Paula has taken, is that she never had biological children, but she has this huge, beautiful family in the theater world. And that’s truly a blessing.”
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