Drive, she said

Paula Vogel steers her Pulitzer winner to Trinity Rep

by Carolyn Clay

Providence playwright Paula Vogel has moved from The Baltimore Waltz to a high-prancing cakewalk. And with more than 50 productions of her 1998 Pulitzer-winning How I Learned To Drive scheduled regionally and internationally for the coming year, she's dancing as fast as she can. Next stomping ground: her own back yard, where How I Learned To Drive opens this weekend at Trinity Repertory Company in a production directed by Molly D. Smith and featuring veteran Trinity actors Anne Scurria and Timothy Crowe as the play's Baltimore-backroads Lolita and her Uncle Peck.

Indeed, Vladimir Nabokov's masterwork was the spark of Vogel's award-winning play, which looks back on the relationship of a precociously well-endowed young woman and the empathetic male relative who, among other things, teaches her to drive. New York magazine calls the play -- which recently completed a 14-month Off Broadway run, winning an Obie, a Drama Desk Award, a New York Drama Critics Award, an Outer Critics Circle Award, and a Lucille Lortel Award -- a "strangely sympathetic exploration of child molestation." The same thing might be said of Lolita, though unlike How I Learned To Drive, it was not written by a lesbian feminist.

According to the 46-year-old Vogel, "I've thought of this play for a long, long time. I was trying to find a way to respond to Lolita. Primarily, I kept re-reading it when I was in graduate school at Cornell, which is great Nabokov hunting ground. And for the same reason that I was drawn to Othello, I was drawn to Lolita." (Vogel is also the author of Desdemona, a play about a handkerchief, which was recently mounted in Boston.) "Isn't it fascinating that here I am as a young feminist, an ardent feminist, so drawn in and wrapped up in empathy for Othello and Humbert Humbert? And one of my first thoughts was, `How would a woman writer do this? Could a woman writer write something where our empathy would be evenly located?'

"I've never seen [David Mamet's] Oleanna; I've only read it. But I did not feel the play was balanced at all. That's a play that I suspect actually divides the audience. What I wanted to do was to write a play so equally balanced in empathy that, as with the experience of reading Lolita, both men and women would project themselves but project themselves equally into Lolita and Humbert Humbert. It's something that's been in my head since I was 22 years old. And what happens when I have these questions is that I let it go until an image comes. And when the image comes, I go, `Oh, there it is,' and then I write the play backwards. The image was a young woman driving and adjusting her rear-view mirror and having a ghost materialize in the back seat." Hence the collision of pedophilia and driver's ed.

"The other thing I've been thinking about since grad school," continues Vogel, "has been how one, as a playwright, can try to get a notion of the interior that novelists give us but plays do not. It's why Aphra Behn quit the stage and invented the novel in the first place. And I thought, `Okay, now that we have Samuel Beckett, now that we have Bertolt Brecht, now that we have expressionism, now that we have all these techniques that Virginia Woolf really didn't have access to, ways of dramatizing that interior and of dramatizing stasis, it's possible.' This has allowed a flowering of women playwrights since the '60s. I mean, [Maria] Irene Fornes directly says she saw Waiting for Godot and that was the night that turned her from a painter into a dramatist."

Listening to Vogel carry on these scholarly chats with herself, it's easy to see why she became a playwright -- and an academic. For 14 years, the author of the Obie-winning The Baltimore Waltz, The Mineola Twins, Hot 'n' Throbbing, and How I Learned To Drive, among other works, has headed the graduate playwriting program at Brown University (from which she is currently on leave). It is less easy to imagine the friendly, open-faced Vogel wallowing in O'Neillian despair or pitching temperamental-artist fits. Indeed, two weeks after becoming the 10th woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, she's manning the Trinity Rep coffeepot, trying to draw decaf for a reporter. She says this is what playwrights do in rehearsals as well.

It's odd when you consider that her home is minutes from the lobby, but until 1997 Vogel's work had not been seen at Trinity Rep. Last year, as part of the first Providence New Play Festival, The Mineola Twins was produced there. It was directed by Vogel's undergraduate chum and frequent collaborator Molly D. Smith, longtime artistic director of Alaska's Perseverance Theatre, who was recently tapped to head DC's venerable Arena Stage (where Vogel will be writer in residence). Smith also helms How I Learned To Drive.

On the surface, the two plays could not seem more different. Vogel calls the outrageous Mineola Twins, which traces 30 years in the lives of good and evil identical sibs, "a kind of comic melodrama." How I Learned To Drive -- despite its lusty three-person "Greek chorus," who play the secondary characters rubbing up against the Lolita-ish Li'l Bit and her Uncle Peck -- is poignant and disturbing. Yet Vogel thinks of the two works as "twin plays." Both possessed of a notably "stacked" female character, they were recently published together as The Mammary Plays. Says Vogel of the arguably provocative appellation, "All of my plays are concerned with the different ways it feels to be a woman in this world, to walk down the street as a woman. I don't know if there will ever be a way to solve the biological rupture, but the cultural differences wrought by secondary sexual characteristics are great."

Vogel actually wrote the role of Li'l Bit for a woman in her 40s looking back toward herself from age 11 to 18. That was because she wrote it picturing longtime American Repertory Theatre actor and current queen of the New York stage Cherry Jones, who had won an Obie for her performance in The Baltimore Waltz. As Jones was unavailable, the New York production starred the decade-younger Mary-Louise Parker. Anne Scurria, Trinity's Li'l Bit, is 40ish. "There are differences," Vogel insists. "With an older actress, the play becomes "more contemplative, whereas when you cast it younger, there's more immediate danger. I had originally intended, in terms of the divided empathy, for Li'l Bit to be becoming Peck's age."

The grown-up Li'l Bit is, in fact, seen in the play picking up a much younger man. "A lot of people are talking about the double standard after seeing this play," admits Vogel, "and talking about the teacher in Seattle. And there is a double standard, I think. Not that that was the primary cause of writing it. The primary cause of writing this was not to trumpet any cause at all. It was to think about Lolita and the empathy question and to try to have a balancing act. I think balancing acts are exactly what theater should be doing, because otherwise the playwright becomes a god with a thesis."

It's no surprise that Vogel, who has written plays dealing with AIDS, domestic violence and pornography, and now child molestation, has come to be thought of as something of a polemicist. "It's interesting. I'm seen as this kind of hot-button, issue-oriented playwright. I think issues are very useful to construct a balancing act, to construct empathy, to try and make an audience look at different sides of an issue. But I don't have a thesis."

She doesn't even have a thesis about the labels stuck to us all like little Post-Its. "I don't hate being `a lesbian woman playwright.' I think there's no choice. And I'm aware that the thing that has kept me out of a lot of theater companies, or has slowed down the progress of the career (and gender and race do that), is also beneficial in How I Learned To Drive. I think the fact that it's a woman writing the play allows people to relax to the complicity that the play explores on Li'l Bit's part. We would have much more difficulty with a male author.

"And do I feel comfortable with that? Not really. I hate categorization. At the same time, I think we have to exhaust categorization in order to break through it. I have been thinking about my mother, who died in January, and she was so proud. But we'd been having these discussions. She'd say, `Oh honey, I know you and I love you. But do you have to keep putting the word `lesbian' in front, because people aren't going to see the `you' that you are. And you know what? She's right. People don't see the `you' that I am because it is labeled that way. I get labeled as `the drill sergeant.' I think that's the latest appellation I got -- in Rhode Island Monthly, in my home town. I don't want people to think of me as a drill sergeant -- unless, of course, it's beneficial and I can use it.

"But there are two discourses going on. One is the discourse between the audience and the stage. You don't want categorization in there. You want to break through it. That's what you do when you explore something as a journey for an evening. Then there's the discourse outside the theater, and it's extremely politicized right now. At this point in time, in this political climate, it would be irresponsible of me, as a teacher and a mentor to young men and women regardless of their sexuality, not to be out. It would be reprehensible of me to have a brother who died of AIDS but suffered far more from the homophobia that he experienced and not to be out.

"I regret that it's one more categorization we're going to have to break through. `Oh, a woman wrote this play.' `Oh, a lesbian wrote this play.' `Oh, a Providence playwright wrote this play.' Ideally, regardless of all the hype, what happens in How I Learned To Drive is that an intimacy is developed. This play demands very good actors and very honest directors and some privacy in the room between those artists and the audience. And hopefully, everything else melts away."

How I Learned To Drive is at Trinity Repertory Company through June 28. Tickets are $24 to $34. Call 401-351-4242.