Paula Vogel :: the personal is political (just ask her about Maine)

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."�

A Boston connection

She holds the Eugene O'Neill Chair of Playwriting. One of her colleagues on the Yale faculty she credits as having particularly inspired her is playwright John Guare. "John is a big influence on my work," Vogel says about the author of "Six Degrees of Separation." "Whenever I see him, I kiss his hand."

At the Huntington, she is thrilled, she says, to be working with director Jessica Thebus, formerly of Steppenwolf Theatre Company in Chicago, and with Daryl Waters, who has many Broadway shows to his credit, who is arranging, supervising and orchestrating the music for A Civil War Christmas.

"I am seeing new things about the play by working with Jessica, Daryl and the Huntington Theatre cast," she says. "It's been my experience as a playwright that you really don't know if a play is working during the first run. It's not until the second production, when you take it to a different city, when you see it performed by a different cast, that you hear it and see it anew. And that's when you really learn about your own work."

It is significant, she says, that the play is being presented in Boston, where "many of my family reside, a city rich in history, and a city that has played an important role in the Civil War." While the play is not "a historical play," she emphasizes, "it is about our history, about our American tapestry. I weave in a homage to Walt Whitman, and I feel it asks questions about how we all connect, how we are all interconnected, to that colorful American tapestry."

She is also looking forward to bringing her family together to see the play in Boston.

"I have written some fairly controversial plays over the years," she says, and then there's that roar of laughter, when she refers to earlier plays that explored controversial themes such as prostitution and sexual abuse. "So here is a production of my play where the young people in my family can actually see something that their Auntie Paula has written."

Ultimately, she says, "A Civil War Christmas is really about me talking to all parts of my family. We have African-Americans in my family, Jews, Christians, folks who immigrated here from all over the globe. My family is just like lots of other families in the United States today. We're part of a fascinating multicultural fabric. And given what we're going through as a country right now, it's an important time for us to think about this. We're all interwoven. That's what my play is about."�?�?�

A Civil War Christmas continues through December 13 on the Huntington's main stage - the Boston University Theatre, 264 Huntington Avenue, Boston. For more information you can go on-line to www.huntingtontheatre.org.?�?

Paula Vogel will be appearing on Sunday, December 6, 2009 at 4:30pm on the mainstage of the Boston University Theatre, 264 Huntington Avenue, Boston. Following the 2pm performance of A Civil War Christmas. FREE and open to the public. Tickets to A Civil War Christmas sold separately.