Meet the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright whose new play premieres this spring

by Evren Odcikin

(This interview was published in the monthly newsletter of Trinity Repertory Company in Providence, RI in March, 2003. Trinity Rep produced the world premiere of the The Long Christmas Ride Home that year)

To interview Paula Vogel is any theatre enthusiast’s dream. Her provocative plays have become American classics in their own right: How I Learned to Drive (1998 Pulitzer Prize), Baltimore Waltz, The Mineola Twins, Desdemona, The Oldest Profession, and Hot 'n Throbbing. I went into this interview bright-eyed, hoping to get a glimpse of how and why this brilliant writer writes. I soon learned that she is as much an educator as an artist, who never misses the chance to delve into what she loves above all: the process of creating theatre.

Evren Odcikin: This comes up in all your plays, so let’s start with the obvious. How much of this play is autobiographical? What are the sources or inspirations for The Long Christmas Ride Home?

Paula Vogel: One of the difficulties when people ask the question: "Is it autobiographical?" is this. If I could think of something to be put on my tombstone, I would love to be called a playwright’s playwright, which means I do write about some things I know. I know Maryland very well. I know those country lanes. I know what it felt like. So I am using the background of my childhood.

I feel frustrated that people have really been examining How I Learned to Drive in terms of autobiographical. Yes, I gave Li'l Bit some aspects of my childhood, I gave her the Maryland backroads. But I gave Peck more of my personality as a teacher and as a middle aged man, than I ever gave Lil Bit. And it’s that some confusion of not knowing how writers use their own personal experience. Yes, they use it in the way the actors do. I’ve known grief. I’ve known separation. I have endowed a great deal of this at the loss of my brother. That’s in every play in the same way that when you ask an actor to examine grief, they are going to examine grief in their own selves, but use it for other characters and other situations.

I am a writer’s writer. And I don’t think people really want to hear as much that this is a tribute to Thornton Wilder’s The Long Christmas Dinner and Happy Journey to Trenton and in some sense Our Town, which was Wilder’s response to Japanese ghost dramas known as Noh.

And it’s something in my life I never actually thought I would do, is to respond to Japanese drama. In some ways, it’s completely anti-Aristotelian, anti-American drama. It's theatre in which time stops. It’s not crisis drama, it’s not about conflict. It’s about distance and perspective. And I am a great admirer of both The Long Christmas Dinner and Happy Journey to Trenton. They are both extraordinary, short little poems of drama that I read when I was in high-school. That’s one source.

The second source is Japanese drama itself. I’ve been reading and reading and reading. The third thing is thinking about Bergman films, in particular Fanny and Alexander. I watched it because there is a tonality in Fanny and Alexander between the brother and sister, I wanted to see if I could in some ways attain as an American dramatist. And that is, there is a “terrible beauty”, those are the words of Yeats actually, someone pointed out to me I was stealing. Fany and Alexander to me is about when things that are terrible are also beautiful, because they are from the perspective of an adult looking at childhood.

The fourth thing was that I wanted to something I’ve never done before. There are two or three things I’ve never done that I am trying to do in this: I've never worked with puppets. I loved puppet plays when I was in grad school and undergrad school. Again I re-looked at the Lorca puppet plays. Of course the Japanese have a very well established puppet theatre called "bunraku".

And, I’ve never written something with consistently elevated language or with music and dance in it. So, I figure, when you are trying to follow something like How I Learned to Drive, which was meant to be a tiny little play, but by some fluke ended up everywhere, I deliberately wanted to write something I’d never done, that was like nothing I’d ever written, to sort of jump off the high-dive.

EO: A lot of people talk about the controversial issues in your plays, but what fascinates most theatre artists is the importance they place on form and structure. So how does that affect this play?

PV: In this play, I am very interested in structure. I am interested in how to create a play world that fragments to do time travel. It’s a constant theme. I am constantly looking through that perspective, which in a way is Japanese, of the adult looking at the child… It’s at the end of How I Learned to Drive, there is a kind of out of body experience as well in Baltimore Waltz, and I thought there was a way to look at it in the relationship between the puppet and the puppeteer, which is actually not Japanese. It’s a very Western approach to it.

What we are all doing, when we are writing new play, is trying to build on the legacy we’ve been given, but to break through. To find out a new way of getting flexibility in a very old form. That’s what we really do, that’s what gets us up in the morning. So for me the fracturing of character, the fragmentation of action is what drives the play.

I am aware that I repeat patterns… There is no way that I couldn’t. I am aware that I am in love with circular form where the beginning is always the end. We just come back to where we’ve started. The whole thing for me in terms of both Thornton Wilder or for example Samuel Beckett or any playwright that I love, be it John Guare, Caryl Churchill or Suzan-Lori Parks, is that the whole thing about a circular structure, where the beginning and the ending are the same, is that the beginning is the same except you gain perspective. The journey gives us perspective or distance, so that the beginning feels different. It’s that certainly the absurdists, certainly Irene Fornes has given us more than anything else. So that’s really where my concern is.

That all aside, I am trying to write this play with a different tonality. It’s a quieter tonality. I mean, there is humor in the play, but it’s a little more focused, a little more concentrated. And I don’t tend to think of plays as solitary things anymore. I am seeing this as a companion piece that I am writing in my head simultaneously with research I am doing on A Civil War Christmas, in the same way that I wrote the Mammary Plays. You know I just saw the Mammary Plays in Denver, I was there thinking, "Oh my God, it’s all the themes of How I Learned to Drive". Why that’s not seen and instead we go for the autobiographical, instead of looking at a writer’s work either as a binary or even a triptage that thematically carries on and bounces of each other. This play very much is me setting up the themes, and looking at the mythology of Christmas for Civil War Christmas, which will be the next piece that follows.

EO: You are working on another Christmas play?

PV: Yes, and let me tell you...I will be very happy, when I can stop listening to Christmas music. (laughs)

EO: Has Christmas always been a very important tradition for you? Is this play really about Christmas?

PV: One of the things that I am interested in is finding things that have a mythic quality for Americans. What are the myths? Because that’s really interesting ground for a writer. Americans have a feeling, have an automatic response to very few things: Thanksgiving, Fourth of July and then there is Christmas. We are at a time right now nationally where in essence, as a country, we have to encounter and understand that we are not alone on the globe, that there are other ideologies and that the world is not Christian. And the way that our Christianity may indeed construct our notions of nationality is a dangerous innocence. Actually… I won’t use the word innocence, I’ll use the word ignorance.

I felt that Christmas would be a good thing to look at. What is the meaning of Christmas? Not because I am Christian, I am not. But because I’ve been "programmed" like every other American. Christmas in this country is not sheerly a religious observance. It’s as much about Capitalism, it’s as much about being consumer. It’s as much about misremembering or forgetting our past. I wanted to look at Christmas as an American phenomenon. There is nothing else that I can think of that has that much emotional power. And wherever there is emotional power that hasn’t been analyzed, that's a very good thing. Christmas is a wonderful thing. It’s a powerful thing. So it’ll be very interesting six months later after Christmas itself and A Christmas Carol, to have enough perspective and distance together, to look at what the meaning of Christmas is.

EO: It’s specifically stated in the script that it should not be performed during Christmas time.

PV: Yes. It’s interesting, with A Civil War Christmas, it’s going to be my first real attempt at writing a family drama. This play on the other hand is still very much an adult drama in a way that How I Learned to Drive is an adult drama. It’s an adult perspective on childhood. It’s not for children. So one of the things I am trying to do is to look at the things that hurt us socially, communally, collectively in such a way that we can look at the darkness without being abused in the process. That’s why I want the distance, I don’t want it done at Christmas time.

What do we all say after Christmas? “Well, we survived it.” We are all breathing a sigh, we made it through. That’s how we feel as adults, we’ve made it through. Even joy, past joy can be a tremendous grief to bear year after year. The echoing resonance of the childhood joy or the time that everybody was alive in the family, gives Christmas a particular sadness and emotional strain. So no, I didn’t want it done at Christmas, I want it done at a time when we’ve survived it yet again. It’s always been my belief that if we go through an experience together and look at it as adults, we come out feeling lighter. It lifts a burden of the shoulders to share it as a community.

EO: It’s been five years since How I Learned to Drive. Have you have you worked on these two plays during that whole time?

PV: I’ve worked on these two plays in my head even before How I Learned to Drive was written. I’ve been working on this one in my head more. When I write a play, it’s because it won’t go away. I work on it in my head and I’ve done the reading. I’ve done about 2-3 years of reading on this one. As friends and neighbors will tell you, I’ve not only been listening to Christmas carols, I’ve been listening to Japanese music and Japanese rock music. And when something becomes an obsession and I won’t feel well and rested again until it’s on the page, that’s when I sit down. So I don’t know how long this has been in my head… For a long, long time.

EO: Do you have a process you like to go through when you are writing a play?

PV: It’s different for every play, because some plays I try to be plot driven, that was Mineola Twins for example. Some plays, just to stretch myself, I try to start by being language driven, that was Hot ‘n Throbbing. Some plays, I try to start as actually structure driven, which was How I Learned to Drive, and to some extent Long Christmas Ride. Although this is also a little more language driven. So a play is being worked on for 5 to 10 to 15 years, it’s put together in little snippets in my head until I finally write it down. There is no one thing. They always involve me listening ad nauseam to a soundtrack that I’ve made over and over and over again. If we went back to my study, I could put on the tape that I’ve made for How I Learned to Drive, and I would know what order the Roy Orbison was and when "Dedicated to the One I Love" would hit. I know exactly the soundtrack to this one. It’s almost an emotional arch of the play, and it keeps me emotionally focused.

I do try to wall myself off, which means this new schedule at Brown is going to be tricky. I am going to have to find ways to retreat in the next couple of years, so that I can remain productive. Plus it’s necessary not only to be away from people, but to be bored with yourself, until only the play world gives you any release or entertainment and you turn to it gladly. You are tired of your own thoughts. That’s necessary, and it’s a very intense isolation. You know, it’s the extremes of playwriting: Intense isolation and then 40 people in the room, everyone saying “I think the play…” You bounce between those two.

EO: Going back to the Pulitzer… You’ve been talking about how you were surprised by it. Now that it’s been five years, you can look back on it with perspective, what was it like?

PV: There was so much activity surrounding the Pulitzer, going around the world, a kind of pressure built into that. Strange and odd and kind of fun trips out to LA, writing screenplays and television pilots. Doing pitches or being pitched other projects... I am relieved that that pressure is over. I am aware that there is more scrutiny than there ever was before, but the nice thing about doing this at Trinity is I get to work here in my hometown. And quite frankly I am more concerned about my students and my work at Brown than I might be with what the critics are going to say, or how the Boston Globe, or New York Times feels about my recent work or whether it’s worthy of How I Learned to Drive. That's the focus and grounding that a hometown offers that is heaven for artists.