  Paula Vogel Speaking in , Paula Vogel confessed that ‘I want to seduce the audi- ence. If they can go along for a ride they wouldn’t ordinarily take, or don’t even know they are taking, then they might see highly charged political issues in a new and unexpected way’. 1 There could hardly be a better or more concise description of her method or philosophy, for while she plainly has her commitments, and locates her work in a poli- ticised environment, she is no ideologue. If her plays are, in a sense, a dialogue with her culture, the nature of that dialogue is open. Neither of the sisters in The Mineola Twins – one conservative, the other radical – has a monopoly on, or, indeed, a firm grasp of truth, anymore than the male protagonist of How I Learned to Drive, who seduces an eleven- year-old girl, could be said to be adequately described by the single word ‘paedophile’. Vogel’s plays do, indeed, take her audiences on a journey they would not ordinarily take but what is unusual about that journey is not only that it frequently takes them into the world of the fantastic and the bizarre but that it liberates them from a Manichaean frame of mind, from a binary mode of thought. Her politics are more inclusive than exclusive, even child abuse turning out to be, in her words, ‘greyer’ than most would be prepared to acknowledge. Indeed, it is a journey of understanding no less for the writer than for those for whom she writes. Thus, though The Baltimore Waltz, like Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, does express anger at the government’s neglect of AIDS, her real subject is less political neglect than loss and the mechanisms we deploy to handle it. The politics of the play defer to the dynamics of human need. If her characters seem to take the audience into unex- pected and seemingly bizarre places – that of the septuagenarian pros- titute, the woman pornographer, the paedophile – what is striking is less their remoteness from our experience than the familiarity of the  1 Steven Druckman, ‘A Playwright on the Edge’, New York Times ( March ), H. dilemma of those who reach out for what consolations they can find, who struggle to make sense of a world that seems to deny them what they need the most. In The Zoo Story Jerry tells the bewildered and resist- ant Peter that sometimes it is necessary to go a long way out of your way in order to come back correctly. That is the nature of the journey on which Vogel takes her audiences. Perhaps, therefore, it is understandable that her two best-known plays – The Baltimore Waltz and How I Learned to Drive – are structured around a journey. That is the essence of how she sees her relationship with an audience. It is also a metaphor for that process of education which her characters themselves experience. She has, she has confessed, concentrated on subjects that are taboo but prevalent in the culture. It is a deliberate tactic, not least because that taboo is liable to be compacted with a subversive energy, and though not ideological Vogel is alert to the theatre’s capacity to engage with what is evaded and aware that that in itself may have political implications. ‘Politics,’ she has insisted, ‘has become a dirty word at the end of the twentieth century . . . Is theatre political? Highly political. Is it danger- ous? Highly dangerous . . . At  o’clock we go in as disparate, individual people. Two hours later we come out as a community that took a journey together. You get elected by dividing and conquering people. Theatre does just the opposite – it forges a community where there wasn’t one before.’ 2 ‘America’, she has said, ‘wants to import its politics and its history, so that it will import Athol Fugard rather than confronting and embracing the vital spectrum of African-American dramatists. We import our political plays about race; we import our plays about history. We will not do Richard Nelson or John Guare’s history plays. It’s frus- trating.’ 3 When Paula Vogel won the  Pulitzer Prize for How I Learned to Drive (a play that had already won an Obie, the Lortel Best Play Award, the Outer Critics Circle Award, the New York Drama Critics Circle Award and the Drama Desk Award) it confirmed her status as one of the most original playwrights to emerge in the s and s, though she had begun writing some time before this. Indeed, when her previously best-known play, The Baltimore Waltz, was staged in , it was her twenty-second. She herself has said that she dates her career from , when she sent  Contemporary American playwrights 2 San Francisco Examiner and Chronicle,( January ). 3 Interview with Christopher Bigsby, May . All subsequent unsourced quotes are from this interview. The Oldest Profession, her play about geriatric prostitutes, to theatres across America only to have it rejected as offensive. Invited by some of those to whom she submitted the play to abandon her career before it started, she was forced to reconsider the play and that putative career. The result was a decision to reaffirm her own vision, to refuse the compromises she was implicitly invited to make, or, more radically, the silence some artis- tic directors chose to propose as her fate. Had she not, after all, scored a success with an earlier play, Desdemona, written in , which came second in the  New Plays Festival at Louisville (in the year Beth Henley’s Crimes of the Heart came first) before disappearing from view until , when its radical post-feminist take on Othello seemed to find a more receptive critical response. To some degree she attributes the slow burn of her career to the fact that gender, and perhaps other aspects of her sensibility, made her work seem tangential to the interests of mainstream theatre. ‘I would point out’, she has said, ‘that it takes longer for women and playwrights of color to break through the resistance and make it their time. Let’s say that a good play is defined as a four-legged animal, but in walks this daz- zling, beautifully colored, six-legged animal. Most people would say that it isn’t a good play. If the world is looking for another Sam Shepard, it’s not going to recognise an Adrienne Kennedy.’ 4 Like Wendy Wasserstein, she was aware of the dominant male discourse not only of American drama but of the dramatic tradition (hence her contesting of that tradi- tion in Desdemona and her ironic engagement with male playwrights in work which in part could be seen as implicit dialogues with such writers as Edward Albee and David Mamet). She was not black, like Adrienne Kennedy, but she was a self-declared lesbian, and that gave her a sense of exclusion as well as a place to stand, a perspective on mainstream values. Paula Vogel is a gay playwright but unlike Tony Kushner, for whom that is a preferred designation, she would rather be known as a play- wright who is gay: what the relation is between my gayness and my work is obscure to me in the same way that I feel drama works by indirection. I’ve been gay so long that it feels straight to me. I think that it has been an asset because it has been one more way that I’ve had to think through the marginalisation of women, so it’s been useful in terms of empathy but in terms of having a direct impact, I think maybe being short is as important. Paula Vogel  4 Ronn Smith, ‘Savage Humor’, Brown Alumni Monthly (April ), p. . A further reason for resisting designation as a gay playwright lies in the fact that: gay playwrights are men writing plays primarily with male protagonists. They are trailing clouds of Hamlet. I am a lesbian playwright dealing with women characters to whom I am trying to give three dimensionality, and the major focus is that – complicating and problematising female characters. Tony can say he is a gay playwright because there is a legacy. You are building not only on the backs of Albee, Williams, Wilson . . . but on the legacy of Chekhov, Ibsen, all the way back. I don’t have that. The topsoil for me is very thin. I look around and I bless Maria Irene Fornes, the women playwrights out there, and I bless Chekhov, Ibsen and Williams who have tried to create and problematise female characters. My forerunners are male playwrights, so for me the notion of my sexuality, and the relation of that to my writing, as a political act – having had a brother who has died of AIDS, having witnessed first hand the discrepancy in civil rights – is important, as it is important to me to be out . . . because I am a teacher. It’s important to my straight students as well as my gay students. If male characters enter trailing clouds of Hamlet, female characters ‘walk on stage as Gertrude or Ophelia’. What is needed, therefore, is a radical engagement with theatrical history no less than with society, since Vogel is no cultural feminist. Resisting notions of biological deter- minism or the prioritising of women as a response to injustice, she seeks rather to explore the manner in which gender assumptions are con- structed and art responds to such constructions. For her, theatre is an authentic dialogue with the culture and with the history of theatre itself (‘Every time you read a play there is a sense in which you are talking to Aristotle’). At a time when cinema seeks to isolate the present moment, to determine, through its own techniques, how it is read, resisting the dialogic, theatre offers itself as a genuine con- versation with self and society alike. However, the politics of her plays owes less to Brecht (a key figure for Kushner) than to the absurd. This is not to say that she borrows either method or philosophy but that she finds in this unlikely source a key to women’s experience. As she has explained, I am drawn to the absurdists and the reason I am drawn to them is because they enable a dramatisation of stasis that didn’t exist prior to that. That, to me, then allows a certain portrayal of female characters on the stage. In the novel it was Virginia Woolf and the stream of consciousness – the necessity to fragment the exterior of realism in order to get at female experience, a female perspective. To me, as a dramatist, this comes through expressionism and absurdism. To me, Brecht does not actually fragment. It fragments the exterior but it is still basi- cally a socialist form and it is still basically looking at us as social and political  Contemporary American playwrights animals. But the notion of the interior that leads us closest to what Virginia Woolf can do is a different assault on the realistic. It is a reminder that in approaching Vogel’s work, structure, style, form, no less than character and the shaping power of language, are of primary concern. Paula Vogel is not part of an homogenised women’s movement con- cerned with consciousness-raising dramatic paradigms or engaging in potential challenges to male autonomy. She is not interested in subvert- ing existing gender, social or moral categories in order to operate others, not interested in seeing her plays as operating in the service of worthy causes. By the same token, her dialogues with male-authored texts do not spring from a rejection of those texts but an ironic engagement with them. At the level of style, no less than of character and subject, she speaks for fluidity of definition, for an alchemical, protean, transforma- tive art. She challenges not so much the normative values of society as definitions of the real. Hers is an allusive, oblique, metaphoric art that does something more than blur the line between realism and fantasy. It concedes authority to the imagination in an acknowledgement of the degree to which the world is a product of consciousness, fantasy being not an evasion of the real but an extension of it. Her characters are themselves often self-con- scious fantasists, quite deliberately challenging one story with another, pitching their fictions against those whose authority comes not from their status but the power that enforces them. Thus Desdemona, in the play of the same name, finding herself trapped in a story not of her own devising, a story which burdens her with purity and innocence, sets out to invent her own, at odds with that master story. The protagonists of The Oldest Profession find greater meaning in the fantasies they enact, as prostitutes, but also as a supposedly homogeneous team of players in the game of life, than they do in a world in which the banality of routine works to reduce them to the role of elderly souls waiting out their lives. In And Baby Makes Seven we are offered a glimpse of the real to which Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ? had apparently sought to win its characters as we are offered enactments of the fantasy children which in Albee’s play existed only within language. Albee opts for an apparently reductive but redemptive reality: Vogel sees the imagination as itself the source not only of consolation but also meaning. The closest parallel to Paula Vogel is, perhaps, Caryl Churchill, though her gender concerns and politics differ from those of a writer Paula Vogel  whose socialist principles have coexisted with feminist beliefs and found direct expression in a play such as Light Shining in Buckinghamshire. In terms of American writers, there are times when her work seems reminiscent of that of Christopher Durang or Maria Irene Fornes, while her dou- bling of characters seems to echo that in Adrienne Kennedy’s plays. But perhaps this is saying no more than that she finds in their work some sanction, beyond her own, to break with more conventional models of dramatic construction, character development, the simple causalities of realism. Even in Vogel’s work the distortion, what David Savran, quoting the Russian formalist critic Victor Shklovsky, calls defamiliarisation, is sometimes the product of little more than a reversed polarity (as in the transformation of Desdemona from virtuous woman to sexual predator) or an unlikely and vaguely shocking proposition (as in Vogel’s portrayal of the female counterparts to David Mamet’s old men in Duck Variations as prostitutes). The defamiliarisation is more radical in And Baby Makes Seven and The Baltimore Waltz, but the principle remains the same, the former giving concrete form to shared fantasies, the latter offering a fantasy correlative to an otherwise deconstructive force. Not that fantasy exists only in order to offer a displaced account of a supposed reality. As implied above, it is an essential component of it. It is plainly one dimension of sexuality (and Vogel explores it as such), but it is equally implicated in the hopes, ambitions, anxieties and fears of the human animal, in that daily life, uncharged with fantasy, uncontami- nated with dreams, enabling myths, vivifying if also threatening fictions, would be unlivable. In that sense Vogel’s is a form of realism, albeit a realism more generously defined. Indeed at times she is tempted to believe that ‘fantasy and imagination are realer’. 5 Paula Vogel grew up outside Washington DC. Her family was divided in a number of ways. Her grandfather was, she has said, ‘a redneck cracker who voted for George Wallace’ (Winer, ‘Paula Vogel’), echoed, perhaps, in the figure of grandpa in How I Learned to Drive, while her brother was a civil rights activist. One parent was Jewish, one Catholic. She was ten years old when her father deserted the family, sixteen when her gay brother left home and seventeen when she announced her les- bianism, a declaration which her mother found hard to accept. Nor did her difficulties end there. Both at Bryn Mawr, where she was an under- graduate, and Cornell, where she taught playwriting and won a national  Contemporary American playwrights 5 Laurie Winer, ‘Paula Vogel’, Mirabella, (June ). prize for Meg, a play about the daughter of Sir Thomas More, she found herself the subject of harassment. As she has explained, however, this sense of marginalisation and rejection was not without its utility to a writer who was to concern herself in part with the excluded. She had, she felt, been given ‘the gift of exclusion’, adding that, ‘I’ll never under- stand what it is to have AIDS or be an artist of color, but, as a Jew and a lesbian, I can directly picture it.’ It seemed particularly significant to her as a writer emerging in the s and achieving success in the s: ‘Look, I’m homophobic and misogynistic, too – I grew up in this country! But I also realize, especially after the Republican convention and after losing my brother, that this is not a time to be silent’. (Winer, ‘Paula Vogel’). That exclusion, however, was not merely political or social. The theatre itself generated its own conservatism, feeding off its own history, reading the present in terms of the past. Those who work in it can too easily retreat from the new, less because of the challenge of its politics than because it embraces an unfamiliar aesthetic. As Vogel has explained, ‘If you try to explore the boundaries of what you’re doing it will always take a gap in time until somebody decodes you . . . I couldn’t understand why I wasn’t being decoded; I thought I was speak- ing the language perfectly clearly.’ 6 That conservatism came partly from within and partly from without, the distinction, perhaps, not being as clear as it seems. Thus she believes that because hers is ‘a racist, misog- ynist, homophobic society . . . after a while it becomes the air you breathe’, and the theatre is no less susceptible to this than any other area of American society. Her plays were not offered as an antidote, still less as a palliative, but they were offered as an irritant. She aimed to disturb and for much of the s she found herself operating in a theatre where that was not a priority. It was, she has said, ‘a decade of good but harm- less work, because people could afford the status quo’. Her own prefer- ence was for work with a rougher edge. For all her professed surprise at not being quickly decoded, she explained that she was content to write flawed plays if they would only change the atmosphere. Vogel moved to New York in  and continued to write plays at the rate of one a year, though without any success and with no financial resources. Then, in , she moved to Brown University, in Providence, which at last gave her a base from which to work. As the s gave way Paula Vogel  6 Stephanie Coen, ‘Paula Vogel: No Need for Gravity’, American Theatre (April ), p. . to the s, and financial restraint gave further impetus to a conserva- tive impulse by reducing the resources that theatre, and hence the play- wright, could command, she saw in this not only a challenge to be addressed but further validation of the free imagination pressed ever closer to the margin: ‘only by having unlimited imagination are we going to be able to keep going. If the only time I’ll get produced is with a three- character play, then how do I create the world with three characters? We get backed into corners, all our handicaps have to become gifts of exclu- sion’ (Coen, ‘Paula Vogel’, p. ). Social circumstance, sexual preference, artistic fate, all combine to forge an aesthetic and shape a dramatic strat- egy. Her sense of speaking from the margin, however, has not driven her to become a spokeswoman. She does not, she has insisted, write lesbian plays or wish to speak for lesbianism or, indeed, women in general. Her resistance to hierarchies, hierarchies of meaning no less than of social organisation, is not so much a political act as an instinctive resistance to category and privileging. There is an American instinct for inclusiveness in her work of a kind to be found in Whitman and perhaps for some of the same reasons. At the same time she does not ‘believe there’s any such thing as the universal in theatre any more’ (Coen, ‘Paula Vogel’, p. ) beyond the fact of sharing the theatrical moment. The particularities of the play invite the audience to meet within its parameters without assert- ing a specious connection to a generalised dilemma. The essence of theatre, as Vogel proposes it, is that it leads the audience beyond the boundaries of the given, that it allows the imagination to define its own space. This is not an abstract space, however. Her figures are earthed in emotional truths. They are responsive to needs which transcend the strategies they devise to handle them. Fear of death, desertion, a quix- otically demanding sexuality, make their situation familiar, even if that familiarity is placed under strain. In other words, the universal is plainly not entirely evacuated from these plays, and could hardly be so; it is simply not to be found in the easy alignment of national destiny, private ambition, psychological or sociological needs to the necessities of char- acters who exist primarily to be exemplars of such generalised concerns. Paradoxically, however, perhaps the true root to the universal which she believes she has drained from her work lies in a shared sense of exclu- sion. There simply is no unevacuated centre any more, no norm from which to diverge unless it be in the scarcely disinterested minds of poli- ticians or the realm of popular myth, the television soap operas and movies with which we seek to perpetuate the notion of shared values,  Contemporary American playwrights shared experiences, a supposedly shared reality. As Vogel observed, in the context of a production of And Baby Makes Seven, ‘If you turn on your television right now, I think we are facing the fact that the nuclear family is not what Mr Quayle would like it to be. We’re not happy little nuclear families with two children and Mummy and Daddy. We’re not pretend- ing that we’re perfect American sitcoms. But we’re all anomalies at this point; we’re all exceptions to the rule. Every time I turn on the television and see Maria Shriver or somebody else, I say “Oh, good. A promotion for And Baby Makes Seven”.’ 7 Vogel has disavowed any intention of writing Ibsenesque problem plays. The nature of the modern family, the fact of sexual preference, the existence of AIDS, paedophilia, may register in her work but they are not her subject. They constitute, she has explained, the atmosphere that her characters breathe. They are not causes she fights, facts which she challenges, or banners she seeks to wave. They are the context within which her characters exist, in search of love, in search of meaning. Nor are such characters quite those to be found in a Chekhov play. They have something of the fluidity of figures in a work by Sam Shepard. At one extreme they are comic gestures, provocative stereotypes (Desdemona); at another they fracture and double (The Mineola Twins), jumping from one story to another, transforming and exploring parallel possibilities (And Baby Makes Seven). In that sense they become postmodern gestures, acting out alternative fictions, never settling for a single perspective. Indeed, much of Vogel’s comedy is generated from an inversion of stories (as in Desdemona), from the games she plays with expectations (The Oldest Profession), the energy released by rapid character change and the over- lapping of fantasy on to a supposed reality (And Baby Makes Seven). As she has said, ‘I find the excitement of comedy and the excitement of theatre is that we are going to explore something together’ (Bilowit, ‘Bringing Up Baby’, pp. f.). Vogel’s is a comedy often generated out of pain, anxiety and confu- sion. Even sickness and death are productive of humour. Tom Lehrer once sang of sliding down the razor blade of life and there is something of that in The Baltimore Waltz and How I Learned to Drive. But there is also resistance, a resistance to the logic of decline, a sense of irony, forgive- ness, reconciliation, which lifts her characters above their circumstances. There is a drive towards understanding of those too easily contained within the shorthand of moral disapprobation, whether it be her senior Paula Vogel  7 Ira J. Bilowit, ‘Bringing Up Baby: Paula Vogel’s Newest Born’, Back Stage  (May ), pp. f. citizen prostitutes, fantasising gay parents, the gay AIDS victim, or a child molester. But if her plays do frequently interrogate aspects of expe- rience, pressing them to extremes, they also engage in an implicit dia- logue with other texts. That was doubly true of Desdemona, which received a staged reading at Cornell University in  but which otherwise had to wait until , when it was co-produced by the Bay Street Theatre Festival and the Circle Repertory Theatre. This was a response equally to Shakespeare’s Othello and to Wolfgang Bauer’s Shakespeare the Sadist. Indeed, she readily acknowledged that her play was ‘written as a tribute (i.e. “rip-off”) to the latter’s “infamous’ work”’. Bauer’s play, whose original title, significantly, was Film und Frau,was first staged in Germany in  and in England in . Vogel’s debt lies less in its content than its structure. A play which features a Swedish pornographic film, starring a character who identifies himself as Shakespeare but is in fact played by one of the play’s four characters, Shakespeare the Sadist is a surreal, sexually charged piece in which film fantasy shapes the consciousness and behaviour of figures who them- selves lack substance. The play is divided into what Bauer describes as forty-nine ‘takes’, with four- to five-second black-outs between each take, the structure reflecting the cinematic motif of the play, in which Bauer insists that the director ‘should make use of the various technical film devices, e.g. film music, the MGM Lion during black-outs, slow motion and accelerated motion’. All music and film titles were to be current to the time of pro- duction. Vogel, while avoiding black-outs, echoed Bauer’s instruction to directors: ‘Desdemona was written’, she explained, ‘in thirty cinematic “takes”. The director is encouraged to create different pictures to simu- late the process of filming: change invisible camera angles, do jump cuts and repetitions, etc.’ 8 In Bauer’s play the style of presentation reflects the content, since film is not only enacted in the sadistic porno extract, in which a woman is tortured, raped and decapitated, but discussed throughout. The ratio- nale for Vogel’s use of cinematic structure and methods is less clear, not least because the play’s theatricality is emphasised in the first ‘take’, in which spotlights pinpoint Desdemona’s lost handkerchief and the figure of Emilia, who discovers it, in a prologue which, paradoxically, given her instruction, ends in a black-out. The play, like Bauer’s, is suffused with  Contemporary American playwrights 8 Paula Vogel, The Baltimore Waltz and Other Plays (New York, ), p. . [...]... refuse him The Mineola Twins offers a comic-book version of American history, an ironic account of the changing manners and morals, commitments and self-deceits, ideologies and betrayals of thirty years of the Republic The twins constitute a Manichaean paradigm, mirror images of one another 12 Paula Vogel, The Mammary Plays (New York, )  Contemporary American playwrights – one deeply conservative,... anxieties attach themselves to uncertainties Paula Vogel  which stem from the ostensible discrepancy between their sexuality and their desire to play conventional roles, but fantasy and anxiety are a common currency and playfulness, game-playing, fiction-making, a necessary component to lives generated out of shared necessities Vogel s narratives are fast-paced, fragmented, cinematic Character and... the fantasy  Contemporary American playwrights children, Vogel has suggested that they may be seen as representing the libido, the id and the super-ego, ‘though it was not that tidy!’ Whatever else it is, And Baby Makes Seven is not offered primarily as a portrait of a gay household or as a contribution to the debate about gay parenting, though it does address the question of the post-nuclear family... who become the physical manifestations of those needs and anxieties One, we are asked to believe, is a nine-year-old genius called Cecil – a part played by Anna; the other two are played by Ruth Henri is an eight-year-old based on the figure from Albert Lamorisse’s film, The Red Balloon (which Vogel had seen ‘many, many times’), the other, Orphan McDermott, has supposedly been raised by wild dogs (the... camp display, part celebration, an invitation to a continued friendship  Contemporary American playwrights beyond the grave Wholly lacking in self-pity, this note and the death that followed, inspired a play that was likewise an oblique and comic account of a relationship, an emotional diary, a dream, an extended account of post-traumatic shock David Savran rightly relates its central conceit to that... quotes from male authors of erotica, or, as Vogel suggests, ‘what many might consider male pornographers’) recites from Molly Bloom’s soliloquy at the end of Ulysses, a male attempt to enter a female sensibility, to understand something of female sexuality and, as Vogel has said, ‘frustrating for that reason’ Leslie Ann then enters and, as Vogel suggests, ‘if Paula Vogel  this play were a film script,... of the five, seventy-two-year-old Vera, sits alone on a bench, staring into a radically foreshortened future, deprived of the conversations which sustained her, stripped of the fictions in which she and her customers took refuge from the evidence of their mortality, and the function which gave factitious meaning to her life There is, Vogel instructs in a stage direction, ‘a quick black-out When the lights... surrendering the one thing that holds him back from despair, an action that has led Vogel to call him ‘heroic’ As Vogel observed, ‘I see him as teaching her ego formation, as giving her the tools to grow up and reject him and destroy him.’ Peck never forces himself on Li’l Bit, though he plots his campaign  Contemporary American playwrights with the skill of a practised seducer and there are suggestions... Nonetheless, they remain dedicated and disciplined, their shared endeavour sustaining them even as, one by one, they slip from the story, dying offstage, appropriately enough during a series of black-outs Paula Vogel  Vogel has explained the play’s origin and its dubious reception by the man who commissioned it: there were two reasons for me writing it I think very consciously about plot forms and I wanted... a relationship that no longer needs the full panoply of desperate invention They meet in a fiction, to be sure, but that fiction now has a quiet Paula Vogel  assurance The music plays softly; the dance never ends And what Anna accomplishes in the play Paula Vogel accomplishes with the play The Baltimore Waltz is a mechanism with which she attempted to neutralise the fact of death with fantasy, as her . her instruction, ends in a black-out. The play, like Bauer’s, is suffused with  Contemporary American playwrights 8 Paula Vogel, The Baltimore Waltz and. where she taught playwriting and won a national  Contemporary American playwrights 5 Laurie Winer, Paula Vogel , Mirabella, (June ). prize for Meg,