The play’s the thing BY BILL RODRIGUEZ

Paula Vogel certainly has been a strong influence on playwrights, as head of Brown’s graduate playwriting program and by giving workshops from Rio to Prague. But she’s also has had a powerful effect on theater lovers worldwide as they’ve discovered her plays in recent years. The first to go big time was her 1992 Obie winner The Baltimore Waltz, a surreal memory journey with her late brother Carl, whom she nursed through AIDS. Then there was her 1998 Pulitzer-winning How I Learned to Drive, which impressed the theater world by dealing empathetically with complex issues in a coming-of-age story.

Yet acceptance in what Vogel now considers her hometown was slow in coming after she came to Brown in 1985. Local non-Equity theaters produced her before Trinity Repertory Company: Alias Stage in 1991 with And Baby Makes Seven, and Hot ’n’ Throbbing at Perishable in 1997, right before Trinity staged Vogel’s The Mineola Twins. It took Adrian Hall’s departure and Anne Bogart’s brief stint as artistic director (1989-90) for a Vogel play to be scheduled at Trinity, although it was promptly cancelled (and a $65,000 AT&T production grant turned down) when Richard Jenkins took over. She doesn’t complain, but it took Brown Summer Theatre to bring The Baltimore Waltz to Providence, although it was widely staged elsewhere. Trinity workshopped How I Learned to Drive, albeit well after Vogel achieved theater celebrity.

Vogel is firmly ensconced at Trinity Rep now that its conservatory has merged with the university’s theater department as the Brown/Trinity Consortium, and by her estimate, she has taught close to 200 playwriting students at the university. New York’s Signature Theatre Company, which is devoting its 2004-05 season to performances of her plays, has further recognized her place in American theater. We spoke in Vogel’s English department office at Brown.

Q: We think mainly of you having nurtured young playwrights, but to what extent have they affected the playwright you’ve become?

A: Oh, much. Much more. I see it more as a scam that I have been managing to get away with. I’m constantly in school without paying tuition. I watch them dare — they’re 20 years younger, 30 years younger, than I am, so they’re taking leaps in form that otherwise I would not be able to process or understand. I think that Baltimore Waltz is probably the first play that really showed the impact of my students on me. Where I just thought, you know, I don’t really need to have a formal structure. I don’t need to have scenes. I could write something seamlessly. I could not ask permission to start a scene. I think the fluidity of my form is directly related to teaching younger writers. They’re raised on cinema. They’re doing cinematic analysis, in terms of the way that they look at theater, versus myself — I’m an older generation. They are completely fluid. They are the MTV generation. Look at how quickly they process images, scenes, words, text — I’m trying to keep up with them. That’s really the truth.

They basically say: "You know, maybe 10 years ago that was interesting, but we kind of expect it now — you’ve got to come up with new tricks." I mean, they jump-start me forward. But I take their work and say: "You have a fellow traveler here; he was born [in] 1795, here he is, you need to read him, this guy."

That’s what we give each other. They give me now — I give them the past.

Q: You’ve seen quite a change in the relationship between Brown’s playwrights and Trinity since when you first walked down College Hill. Ten years ago, you told me that Providence had been "a closed shop" for you in 1985, that when you approached Trinity, you were informed the theater didn’t want anything to do with playwrights from academia. Tell us about the change.

A: A wonderful change. A crucial challenge. Well, for one thing, I think that that attitude came on both sides of the fence. From professors who are no longer here who felt that the real world in some way contaminated the purity of the mind. And I think that Adrian Hall’s generation at Trinity felt antipathy towards academia as a result. That generation’s gone. We’re now at a point where we’ve got artist-scholars all the time in academia. The world of doing our craft and the world of teaching our craft have really become one.

Q: To such an extent that there’s this consortium. Once an alliance was suggested between the Brown playwriting program and Trinity Conservatory, it couldn’t have been a foregone conclusion that it would come about. There were things to lose — control, identity — as well as gain. What did it take for the proposal to become a win-win proposition?

A: A number of things. Before Oskar came, I tried to get a model up and working, and it just crashed and burned. It was not going to happen. I think that the factor that made it happen was Oskar Eustis coming to town. Because I think Oskar has the vision from his side of the fence of the importance of the university, of the importance of different models coming together. I think he has the mind and heart to make it happen. He’s very, very persuasive. And I think this is something that he really wanted to do. I don’t think it would’ve happened if he’d not taken the job. I think we’d still be separate entities, going, "It would be great if this were to happen," but never really making it happen.

Q: What’s going on?

A: Theater is a political forum, like any place else. It reflects who we are as a country. It’s always astonishing for people to hear that theater can be as misogynistic, as homophobic, as racist. Because we look to theater, we think that theater is always avant-garde, that theater is always moving ahead. I think all the problems we encounter, of being separate, are also reflected in the theater. I think that we still tend to think that white men are writing universal plays and that anyone who differs in any way from that equation is not writing universal plays — [is writing] plays that will not succeed at the box office. If we believe that as theater organizations — I do not — if times get hard, and suddenly our corporate and foundation funding is drying up because we’re having hard economic times, one is even less likely to quote-unquote experiment and be producing plays by women, producing plays by writers of color, producing plays by queer writers, et cetera, and so forth. I mean, there is a fear factor here, there’s an entrenchment that is happening in not-for-profit theater.

The thing that I think has to happen — and it’s an exhausting proposition, but I think it’s where we are, it’s what I did — is you start theater companies on your own. You don’t wait for a regional theater, a LORT theater, an off-Broadway theater, to do you. You produce yourself. And I think what’s happening now is we’re having more and more. Perishable Theatre now seems like an institutional theater compared to some of the newer theaters. It actually has a stable space. It’s been running how many years? I think what Perishable did back 20 years ago is happening all over the country.

Q: And yet some not familiar with the specifics can look at three women winning Pulitzers for drama in five recent years, including yourself, and think that the problem’s been solved.

A: The problem has not been solved. I think what we do is we tend to — and I hate to be used in this position — we tend to go, "Oh, Paula Vogel’s plays are being done all around the country, so we’re okay. We don’t have to go on developing local women writers, because were doing a Paula Vogel play." I hate being used in the same way that women were used as an excuse to not read my play. And that’s what’s happening. Quite frankly, if people want to call me up, I’ve got a long list of women writers to suggest to them. Bless Perishable for doing a women’s playwriting festival. It’s very necessary. It’s more necessary today than it was 10 years ago, which is frightening.

Q: The Baltimore Waltz and other plays of yours have been informed by your being a lesbian feminist. But How I Learned to Drive didn’t express that perspective overtly. Baltimore Waltz was nominated for a Pulitzer, but didn’t win, as the other play did. Do playwrights put themselves at a disadvantage by dwelling on gender politics these days?

A: Here’s what I want to say: yes and no. If it’s absolutely crucial to the piece, one has to put it in. If it’s essential, if it’s something that people need to know, must know, then I think it’s absolutely essential to put it into the piece. It has been said that How I Learned to Drive won the Pulitzer because the core identity was submerged versus Baltimore Waltz — which, by the way, didn’t have any lesbianism in it at all. I happen to think that as a writer I just wore down the judges.

I’m out as a playwright so that I can, hopefully, when I go to the page, become completely unconscious and subliminal as a writer, be sexless if you will. Let the playwright determine what is seen in the light and what is submerged, and not my own identity. The reason that I’m a playwright rather than a performance artist is I don’t want to put myself on stage. I’d rather subsume other identities. I’d rather be a 45-year-old pedophile and see how that feels than remain constantly as a lesbian feminist. Does being a lesbian feminist influence the work? Of course, it does. So does my being a woman. So is my being half-Jewish, all of those things. But I wouldn’t hold back, if it’s essential to the play.