Vassar Hosts Pulitzer Prize-Winning Playwright Paula Vogel
Paula Vogel walked into a high school drama class when she was 15 years old, and an hour later she was hooked on the theater. “The class did a reading of The Skin of Our Teeth by Thornton Wilder,” Vogel said during a talk moderated by Assistant Professor of Drama Peter Gil-Sheridan in the Martel Theater on March 23. “At the end of the class, I remember thinking to myself, ‘I gotta stay here.’”
Theater lovers are glad Vogel did. She has won numerous playwrighting awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for How I Learned to Drive. Her latest play, Indecent, earned her a Tony Award and recently spawned a national debate on censorship when school officials prevented a Jacksonville, FL, high school drama club from performing it.
Vogel said that when she learned she had won the Pulitzer Prize, she remembered how horrified her mother had been that she had chosen to major in drama in college rather than planning to go to law school. “I think Mom sat Shiva when she heard what I had decided,” she joked. “I’m sure I would have been a good lawyer, and it probably would have given me some pleasure, but it wouldn’t have given me joy. The theater gives you three things: frustration, challenges, and joy. It's like playing three-dimensional chess every time you start a production.”
Vogel said she thought her mother would change her mind when she won the Pulitzer. “I reminded her that she told me I’d never earn more than minimum wage writing plays,” she said. “My mother responded that if I added up all the hours I spent writing that play, it probably wasn’t minimum wage, so I guess it’s all point of view.”
Video Credit: Jim Sulley
Vogel said her most enjoyable moments when she first discovered her love for the theater didn’t come as an actor but rather as a stage manager, far from the audience. “I was a terrible actor and I can prove it,” she said. “Shortly after I transferred from Bryn Mawr to Catholic University, I was cast as this very butch lesbian in a play called The Killing of Sister George, and I bustled around the stage and had to learn to smoke cigars. During the post-play discussion with the audience, I learned no one believed I was a lesbian, and I said to myself I gotta find another way to stay in the room.”
Vogel said shortly after she began her time as a stage manager or member of a sound or lighting crew, she recalled seeing actors’ faces being lit up on stage. “They just looked so beautiful in that light,” she said. “I became addicted, and I often tell young people that the theater is the safest addiction you can have in your life.”
Vogel said she found a way to pay for her “addiction” by teaching drama, first at Brown University from 1984 to 2008. From 2008 to 2012, she was the O’Neill Chair at Yale School of Drama, and she was the first Playwright in Residence at the UCLA School of Theater, Film, and Television in 2019.
It was while she was at Brown that she began to devise games to help her students write plays. She said she helped them kick-start their writing by posting a single word on her office wall and giving them four days to write a play based on that word. Later, she expanded the idea into what she called a “bake-off.” Everyone playing the game was given a few elements for the plot and they all had 48 hours to write as much as they could, “and then we’d come back and put them all together.”
Vogel said her ideas for these games were spawned by her belief that theater is “the audience saying ‘Come play with me,’ and even artists who have been dead for a couple of centuries can join in the game.”
Asked later during the question-and-answer session how to start writing a play, she replied, “You don’t start a play. You start a scene, and then another and then another, and then you organize them and you build from there.”
When asked by Gil-Sheridan about the banning of her play Indecent at the Jacksonville high school, Vogel said she had long been concerned about the level of censorship of the arts in the United States. “Am I worried? Yes, I am desperately worried,” she said. “But what gives me hope is how the parents and the students in that Jacksonville high school are fighting back. I have talked to those parents, and we need to make light for them and have the emotional and spiritual muscles to resist.”
Vogel said she is often reminded of a quote she heard from the revered actor and acting teacher Stella Adler. “She said you need three things to survive in the theater: the tenacity of a bulldog, the hide of a rhinoceros, and a good home to come home to. If you have those three things, nothing can stop you.”