Entertainment :: Theatre
Paula Vogel :: the personal is political (just ask her about Maine) by Robert Israel
EDGE ContributorMonday Nov 23, 2009
Paula Vogel radiates enthusiasm. In her 58 years, she has achieved much. She is an acclaimed playwright (How I Learned to Drive won a Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1998). She is a successful university professor. She has served as a mentor to a host of award winning playwrights, including Nilo Cruz and Lynn Nottage, (they both went on to win their own Pulitzers). And she is joyous about her play, A Civil War Christmas, which is currently playing on the Huntington’s B.U. Theatre in Boston through December 13.
Vogel bursts into warm and infectious laughter one minute when she tells a story about her family that strikes her fancy. But her joviality vanishes quickly the next minute when the subject turns to a discussion about gay rights.
We chatted before rehearsals at the Huntington Theatre, the day after the decision by voters in Maine on November 3 to strike down a law allowing same-sex couples to wed.
The vote in Maine troubled her deeply.
"I woke up at five o’clock in the morning and heard the depressing news about the vote in Maine," Vogel says. Her tone is somber. As she speaks about it, she sounds personally wounded.
"And all I can say is this: I am so very glad my legal place of residence always will be in Massachusetts, because it was in Massachusetts, in Truro, where my wife Anne and I were married in 2004. And we intend to stay in Massachusetts for personal and political reasons."
Personal is political, and political is personal
For Vogel, personal is political, and political is personal. She takes a stand, like, for example, her decision to leave Brown University in Providence after 24 years of teaching graduate level playwriting. During those years, she co-founded the Brown/Trinity Repertory Consortium with Trinity’s former artistic director Oskar Eustis. Trinity Rep also produced her plays, How I Learned to Drive, and The Long Christmas Ride Home. She and her wife, Anne Fausto-Sterling, who own a home in Edgewood, a neighborhood on the Providence-Cranston line, had both achieved the rank full tenured professors. Many, having arrived at similar circumstances, would see this as a time to settle in. But not Vogel: she is not one to rest on her laurels. She headed for a new destination: Yale University, to chair the School of Drama and to join their faculty.
Yale, as the saying goes, made her an offer she couldn’t refuse.
"I am part of a vibrant theatrical village in New Haven," she says, mentioning that she also has an affiliation as associate artist with the nearby Long Wharf Theatre, where A Civil War Christmas was commissioned and where its first production - it received favorable notices -was presented last year.
"After 24 years at Brown," Vogel adds, "and working with a host of talented students who enriched my life, including Huntington’s Peter DuBois, I felt I took the program as far as I could. I went into teaching insisting that I would also be taught. For me, teaching is also about learning."
Yale School of Drama, she says, offers her many opportunities to learn. She lists them: "I get to work with stage managers, designers, costumers, dramaturgs, actors, new and established playwrights. It is a fabulous learning environment to be part of."
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