Paula Vogel

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Paula Vogel
Vogel in 2022
Vogel in 2022
Born (1951-11-16) November 16, 1951 (age 72)
Washington, D.C., U.S.
OccupationPlaywright, professor
EducationBryn Mawr College
Catholic University (BA)
Cornell University (MA, PhD)
Notable awardsPulitzer Prize for Drama (1998)
Spouse
​
​
(m. 2004)​

Paula Vogel (born November 16, 1951) is an American

American Theatre Hall of Fame
.

She started her career with the her off-Broadway play

Broadway debut with Indecent in 2017 which earned her a nomination for the Tony Award for Best Play. She returned to Broadway with her latest play, Mother Play
(2024).

A longtime teacher, Vogel spent the bulk of her academic career – from 1984 to 2008 – at

Yale School of Drama, as well as playwright in residence at the Yale Repertory Theatre.[1]

Early life and education

Vogel was born in

The Catholic University of America (BA, 1974) and Cornell University
(MA, 1976; PhD, 2016).

Career

1992–2014: Early works and breakthrough

A productive playwright since the late 1970s, Vogel first came to national prominence with her

AIDS-related seriocomedy The Baltimore Waltz, which won the Obie Award for Best Play in 1992. She is best known for her Pulitzer Prize-winning play How I Learned to Drive (1997), which examines the impact and echoes of child sexual abuse and incest. Other notable plays include Desdemona, A Play About A Handkerchief (1993), The Oldest Profession (1981), And Baby Makes Seven (1984), Hot 'N Throbbing (1994), and The Mineola Twins
(1996).

Her play The Oldest Profession was first read in February 1981 at the Hudson Guild, New York City, directed by

Signature Theatre Company production.[5]

And Baby Makes Seven premiered

Desdemona and Cherry Jones as Bianca.[9]

Lucille Lortel Award, Outstanding Director (Landau) and Outstanding Costume Design, (Toni-Leslie James) and won the Lortel Award for Outstanding Lighting Design (Scott Zielinski).[11] Artists Repertory Theatre
, located in Portland, Oregon, presented A Civil War Christmas: An American Musical Celebration, from November 22 to December 23, 2016.

2015–present: Broadway debut

Vogel's first play with music, Indecent, co-created and directed by Rebecca Taichman, premiered at Yale Repertory Theatre on October 2, 2015, and then ran at La Jolla Playhouse (San Diego) in November 2015.[12][13][14] Indecent was a finalist for the 2016 Edward M. Kennedy Prize for Drama.[15]

The play premiered Off-Broadway at the Vineyard Theatre, running from April 27, 2016 (previews), officially on May 17, 2016, and closing on June 19, 2016. The play was nominated for the 2016

Cort Theatre on April 4, 2017, in previews, and opened April 18.[17][18] The Off-Broadway cast, featuring Adina Verson and Katrina Lenk, reprised their roles in the Broadway production, with additional cast including Ben Cherry, Andrea Goss, and Eleanor Reissa. The play has music composed by Lisa Gutkin and Aaron Halva.[19] The play is being produced by Vineyard Theatre in association with La Jolla Playhouse and Yale Repertory Theatre. This marks Vogel's Broadway debut.[20] The play "is inspired by the real-life controversy surrounding the 1923 Broadway production of Sholem Asch's 'God of Vengeance', the love story of two women."[21] Indecent was nominated for the 2017 Outer Critics Circle Awards: Outstanding New Broadway Play, Rebecca Taichman as Outstanding Director of a Play, Outstanding Lighting Design, Outstanding Projection Design (Tal Yarden), Outstanding Featured Actor In A Play (Richard Topol), and Outstanding Featured Actress In A Play (Katrina Lenk).[22] The play was nominated for the 2017 Drama Desk Award, Outstanding Play and Outstanding Lighting Design for a Play (Christopher Akerlind).[23]

Vogel will premiere a new work titled Mother Play on Broadway as part of Second Stage Theater's 2023-2024 season. [24]

Style and themes

Although no particular theme or topic dominates her work, she often examines traditionally controversial issues such as sexual abuse and prostitution. Asserting that she "writes the play backwards," moving from emotional circumstances and character to craft narrative structure, Vogel says, "My writing isn't actually guided by issues.... I only write about things that directly impact my life." Vogel adds, "If people get upset, it's because the play is working." These issues appear in Vogel's Desdemona (1994), where the narrative of a brothel is used to give female characters agency, or "give back to Desdemona power to accompany her activity."[25] Vogel's family, especially her late brother Carl Vogel, influences her writings. Vogel says, "In every play, there are a couple of places where I send a message to my late brother Carl. Just a little something in the atmosphere of every play to try and change the homophobia in our world."[26] Carl's likeness appears in such plays as The Long Christmas Ride Home (2003), And Baby Makes Seven, and The Baltimore Waltz.

"Vogel tends to select sensitive, difficult, fraught issues to theatricalize," theatre theorist Jill Dolan comments, "and to spin them with a dramaturgy that's at once creative, highly imaginative, and brutally honest."[27] Her work embraces theatrical devices from across several traditions, incorporating, in various works, direct address, bunraku puppetry, omniscient narration, and fantasy sequences. Critic David Finkel finds this breadth in Vogel's career to be reflective of a general tendency toward stylistic reinvention from work to work. "This playwright recoils at the notion of writing plays that are alike in their composition," Finkel writes. "She wants each play to be different in texture from those that have preceded it."[28]

Academic and teacher

Vogel, a renowned teacher of playwriting, counts among her former students

MacArthur Fellow Sarah Ruhl, and Pulitzer Prize-winners Nilo Cruz, Lynn Nottage, and Quiara Alegría Hudes.[29][30]

During her two decades leading the graduate playwriting program and new play festival at

Yale School of Drama, which she held until 2012,[32] and the Playwright-in-Residence at Yale Repertory Theatre.[33][34] She is currently the Eugene O'Neill Professor (adjunct) of Playwriting at Yale School of Drama and playwright-in-residence at the Yale Repertory Theatre, as well as an artistic associate at Long Wharf Theatre.[35] Vogel previously served as an instructor at Cornell University
during her graduate work in the mid-1970s.

Personal life

Vogel had two brothers: Carl, who died of

AIDS in 1988, and Mark. Carl is namesake for the Carl Vogel Center in Washington, D.C., founded by their father Don Vogel. The center is a service provider for people living with HIV.[2]

Vogel married Brown University professor and author Anne Fausto-Sterling in Truro, Massachusetts, on September 26, 2004.[2]

Theatrical works

As a Playwright

Year Title Venue Ref.
1984 And Baby Makes Seven New York City
1992 The Baltimore Waltz Yale Repertory Theatre
1993 Desdemona, A Play about a Handkerchief Bay Street Theatre, Off-Broadway
1994 Hot 'N Throbbing American Repertory Theater
1996 The Mineola Twins Perseverance Theatre
1997
2022		 How I Learned to Drive Vineyard Theare, Off-Broadway
Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, Broadway
2003 The Long Christmas Ride Home Trinity Repertory Company
2008 Civil War Christmas Long Wharf Theatre, New Haven [36]
2014 Don Juan Comes Home from Iraq Wilma Theater, Philadelphia [37]
2015
2017		 Indecent Yale Repertory Theatre
Cort Theatre
, Broadway		 [38]
2024 Mother Play
Helen Hayes Theater
, Broadway		 [39]

Awards and honors

Year Association Category Nominated work Result Ref.
1998 Pulitzer Prize for Drama How I Learned to Drive Won [40]
2017 Drama Desk Award Outstanding Play Indecent Nominated
2017
Tony Award
 Best Play Nominated [41]
2022 Best Revival of a Play How I Learned to Drive Nominated
2017 Obie Award Lifetime Achievement Won [42]

Subsequent to her Obie Award for Best Play (1992) and Pulitzer Prize in Drama (1998), Vogel received the Award for Literature from

PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater Award for a playwright in mid-career.[44]

In 2003, the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival created an annual Paula Vogel Award in Playwriting for "the best student-written play that celebrates diversity and encourages tolerance while exploring issues of dis-empowered voices not traditionally considered mainstream."[45] In 2013, Vogel was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame.[46]

In 2016, Vogel successfully completed and defended her doctoral thesis at Cornell University, more than 40 years after she began her graduate work. She was awarded her Ph.D. in Theatre Arts in May.[47] Vogel received the 2017 Obie Award for Lifetime Achievement.[48] Vogel is featured in the book 50 Key Figures in Queer US Theatre (2022), with a profile written by theatre scholar Sara Warner.[49]

In 2015 Paula Vogel's literary archive was obtained by the

Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, and she became the first female playwright included in the library's Yale Collection of American Literature.[50]

Bibliography

  • Swan Song of Sir Henry (1974)
  • Meg (1977)
  • Apple-Brown Betty (1979)
  • Bertha in Blue (1981)
  • The Oldest Profession (Hudson Guild, New York City reading, 1981)

References

  1. ^ "Playwright Vogel returns to campus for Ph.D. | Cornell Chronicle". news.cornell.edu. Retrieved 2018-07-26.
  2. ^ a b c "Paula Vogel, Anne Fausto-Sterling". The New York Times. September 26, 2004. Retrieved December 25, 2008.
  3. The Detroit Jewish News
    .
  4. ISBN 1-55936-713-X
    , pp. 128-129
  5. ^ "'The Oldest Profession' Off-Broadway" Archived 2015-10-07 at the Wayback Machine lortel.org, accessed October 4, 2015
  6. ^ Gerard, Jeremy (May 11, 1993). "Review. 'And Baby Makes Seven'". Variety.
  7. ^ "'And Baby Makes Seven' Off-Broadway Listing" Archived 2015-10-07 at the Wayback Machine lortel.org, accessed October 4, 2015
  8. ISBN 1-55936-713-X
    , p. 60
  9. ^ Vogel, Paula. Desdemona: A Play about a Handkerchief, Dramatists Play Service, Inc., 1994,
    ISBN 0822213915
    , p. 3
  10. Playbill
    .
  11. ^ A Civil War Christmas , lortel.org, accessed October 27, 2016
  12. Playbill
    .
  13. Playbill
    .
  14. ^ "'Indecent' Listing" Archived 2016-03-05 at the Wayback Machine lajollaplayhouse.org, accessed January 28, 2016
  15. ^ "Finalists Announced for 2016 Edward M. Kennedy Prize for Drama Inspired By American History" kennedyprize.columbia.edu, January 27, 2016, accessed January 28, 2016
  16. Playbill
    .
  17. Playbill
    .
  18. Playbill
    .
  19. Playbill
    .
  20. Playbill
    .
  21. Playbill
    .
  22. Playbill
    .
  23. Playbill
    .
  24. ^ [1]
  25. ProQuest 1611895318
    – via ProQuest.
  26. BOMB Magazine
    . Retrieved July 19, 2011.
  27. ^ Dolan, Jill (March 1998). "How I Learned to Drive (review)". Theatre Journal. Vol. 50, no. 1. p. 127.
  28. ^ Finkle, David (5 November 2003). "Review: The Long Christmas Ride Home". TheaterMania. Retrieved 2008-12-25.
  29. ^ Adam Bock (Fall 2007). "The Journey of The Receptionist". Manhattan Theatre Club (Interview: transcript). Interviewed by Annie MacRae. Archived from the original on July 31, 2009. Retrieved December 25, 2008.
  30. ^ Raymond, Gerard (October 12, 2004). "Paula Vogel: The Signature Season". TheaterMania. Retrieved December 25, 2008.
  31. ^ Mead, Rebecca (March 22, 2010). "Stage Left". The New Yorker. p. 25.
  32. Playbill
    .
  33. ^ Robertson, Campbell (18 January 2008). "Paula Vogel Goes to Yale". The New York Times. Retrieved December 25, 2008.
  34. Playbill. Archived from the original
    on 9 July 2008. Retrieved December 25, 2008.
  35. ^ "Vogel Bio". Yale Rep. Archived from the original on October 5, 2015. Retrieved October 4, 2015.
  36. ^ Hetrick, Adam (November 26, 2008). "Vogel's A Civil War Christmas Premieres in New Haven Nov. 26". Playbill. Retrieved October 27, 2016.
  37. ^ "'Don Juan Comes Home from Iraq', Wilma Theater" wilmatheater.org, accessed October 2, 2015
  38. ^ Indecent 2017 Tony Awards nominations
  39. ^ [2]
  40. ^ "How I Learned to Drive". Pulitzer.org. Retrieved April 14, 2024.
  41. ^ "Paula Vogel". Playbill. Retrieved April 14, 2024.
  42. ^ "Paula Vogel Theatre". Abouttheartist. Retrieved April 14, 2024.
  43. Playbill
    .
  44. ^ "1999 Literary Award Winners" pen.org, accessed October 4, 2015
  45. ^ "The Paula Vogel Award in Playwriting". The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. 2007. Retrieved December 25, 2008.
  46. Playbill
    .
  47. ^ Warner, Sara. "Playwright Vogel returns to campus for Ph.D.", cornell.edu, March 29, 2016
  48. ^ "Obie Awards 2017" obieawards.com, retrieved May 25, 2017
  49. ISBN 978-1032067964
    .
  50. ^ Purcell, Carey (January 8, 2015). "Yale Library Obtains Archive of Paula Vogel, First Female Playwright Included in American Literature Collection". Playbill.

External links

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