Vogel, Paula

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    Jessica Lange and Paula Vogel on Breaking, and Keeping, the Family Contract

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    In the Tony-nominated “Mother Play,” the writer conjures warm memories and thorny ones, not to judge her mother, but to understand — and to forgive.It is one of life’s great strokes of luck to have an excellent mother. The playwright Paula Vogel didn’t get one. The actress Jessica Lange did: sweet and nurturing, accepting of her children, the kind of mom the other kids wished was theirs.“I had a perfect mother,” Lange, 75, said on a June afternoon in a lounge at the Helen Hayes Theater in Midtown Manhattan, her tone making clear that she wasn’t boasting or being hyperbolic. She was simply stating a fact, one that she realizes is “beyond fortunate,” and sets her own warm familial dynamic apart from that of the characters in Vogel’s “Mother Play: A Play in Five Evictions.” At the drama’s center is a painfully less than ideal parent. Lange is up for a Tony Award for portraying her.To Vogel, 72, a Pulitzer Prize winner for “How I Learned to Drive,” a backward-spooling 1997 memory play inspired by her uncle, the scenario of a mother who doesn’t exactly throw herself into the job is as familiar as her personal past: autobiography spun into drama.“I’m the kid that found other friends’ mothers, and went home with them after school,” she recalled, perched across a high, round-topped table from Lange. “I remember once coming into a friend’s house drenched from the rain, and her mother brought me a bathrobe and said, ‘Take your clothes off in the bathroom. I’m drying your clothes.’ I’m like” — and here Vogel channeled a child’s voice, wonder-struck — “‘You are? You’d do that for me?’”Lange in “Mother Play” with Celia Keenan-Bolger, who plays a younger, fictionalized version of Vogel.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesStill, “Mother Play,” a best-play Tony nominee, is not an exercise in demonization or revenge. Condemning Phyllis, the mother — who shares Vogel’s mother’s name — is not the point. Understanding her is.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Review: Jessica Lange Stars in Paula Vogel’s ‘Mother Play’

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      Jessica Lange stars as a ferocious matriarch alongside Celia Keenan-Bolger and Jim Parsons in Vogel’s latest family drama.In the first scene of “Mother Play: A Play in Five Evictions,” Paula Vogel’s antic, mournful new drama, Martha, a character modeled on the playwright, offers a version of Ecclesiastes.“There is a season for packing,” Martha (Celia Keenan-Bolger) says as she slits open a cardboard box. “And a season for unpacking.”Vogel, 72, has spent the majority of her career unpacking. Her work is not strictly autobiographical, but as in the plays of Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee or Adrienne Kennedy, she has a canny way of rearranging the emotional furniture of her lived experience into tragicomedy.Here, at Broadway’s Helen Hayes Theater, that furniture includes a mother, Phyllis (Jessica Lange), and a brother, Carl (Jim Parsons), named for Vogel’s own family. The story begins in 1964 with the family moving into a basement apartment in a Washington, D.C., suburb; Carl is 14, Martha 12. Phyllis is in her mid 30s, barely treading water after a foundered marriage. At times, when she can pry her hands from a gin bottle, she clings to her children as if they are life rafts. Otherwise, she regards them as jetsam. Phyllis, we learn, never wanted to be a mother.On finding herself pregnant: “I thought: Other women aren’t mother material, but they get through it. Just hang on, Phyllis, hang on. But it is never over. It’s a life sentence.” How’s that for a bedtime story?As a single working mother, Phyllis can afford only custodial apartments, and those early evictions come when she complains too loudly about the roaches and maggots. The vermin are brought to life, extravagantly, in Shawn Duan’s projections. And David Zinn’s flexible set nimbly conveys each new abode. The later, more fraught expulsions come when Phyllis rejects first Carl, who comes out as gay in college, and then later Martha, who is also queer.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      How Jewish People Built the American Theater

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      HOW ARE THINGS in Glocca Morra?” is a song from the 1947 musical “Finian’s Rainbow,” which is about, among other things, a leprechaun. Glocca Morra doesn’t exist, and if it did, it wouldn’t be in, say, Poland. The song is sung by a homesick Irish lass in the American South; like the show overall, it […] More

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      Jessica Lange Leads Starry Cast in Paula Vogel’s ‘Mother Play’

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      “Mother Play,” set in the 1960s, will feature Lange as a mother raising two children, played by Jim Parsons and Celia Keenan-Bolger.Jessica Lange, Jim Parsons and Celia Keenan-Bolger will return to Broadway next spring to star in a new family drama by the acclaimed playwright Paula Vogel.The show, called “Mother Play,” begins outside Washington in 1962, and is about a strong-willed mother raising two children as the family relocates.Lange, 74, will play the mother. She is a two-time Oscar winner (for “Tootsie” and “Blue Sky”) who won a Tony Award in 2016 for playing another difficult mother — Mary Tyrone in a revival of “Long Day’s Journey Into Night.”Keenan-Bolger, 45, is a four-time Tony nominee who won the prize in 2019 for “To Kill a Mockingbird”; she will play the daughter. Parsons, 50, who last appeared on Broadway in a 2018 production of “The Boys in the Band,” will play the son.Vogel, who is considered one of the nation’s leading teachers of playwriting as well as a top practitioner of the craft, won a Pulitzer Prize in 1998 for “How I Learned to Drive,” which was later staged on Broadway in 2022. She has had one other Broadway outing with the play “Indecent,” which was staged in 2017.“Mother Play” will be directed by Tina Landau (“SpongeBob SquarePants”) and presented on Broadway by Second Stage Theater, a nonprofit dedicated to work by living American writers. The play is scheduled to begin previews April 2 and to open April 25 at the Helen Hayes Theater, which is a small Broadway house owned by Second Stage.“Mother Play” will follow Second Stage’s Broadway production of “Appropriate,” a 2014 drama by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, also at the Hayes. That production will be directed by Lila Neugebauer and will star Sarah Paulson; previews begin Nov. 29 and the opening is scheduled for Dec. 18. More

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      Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and Paula Vogel Are Broadway Bound

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      Second Stage, a nonprofit with a focus on living American dramatists, said it will present works by the playwrights on Broadway this season.Second Stage, a nonprofit theater that focuses on work by living American writers, said it will present a well-known piece by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and a new work by Paula Vogel on Broadway this season.This fall, the company plans to stage “Appropriate,” Jacobs-Jenkins’s play about a family gathering in Arkansas disrupted by the discovery of a photo album filled with disturbing images.The play was staged in 2014 at the Signature Theater Company, an Off Broadway nonprofit. Ben Brantley, then The Times’s chief theater critic, praised it as “remarkable and devious.”The new production, which is to begin performances in November and open in December at the Helen Hayes Theater, is to be directed by Lila Neugebauer (“The Waverly Gallery”). Jacobs-Jenkins, a 2016 recipient of the so-called “genius grant” from the MacArthur Foundation, is a two-time Pulitzer finalist, for “Gloria” and “Everybody,” and is also the author of “The Comeuppance,” now running at the Signature Theater in Manhattan. “Appropriate” will be the first play he has written to be staged on Broadway, although he contributed material to a recent Broadway revival of Thornton Wilder’s “The Skin of Our Teeth.”Next spring, Second Stage plans to present a new play, not yet titled, by Vogel, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “How I Learned to Drive.” That play, to begin performances in March and open in April at the Hayes, is to be directed by Tina Landau, and is a family drama set in suburban Washington in 1962. Vogel is also the author of “Indecent,” which was produced on Broadway in 2017.Second Stage said that this fall it would also present an Off Broadway production of Jen Silverman’s new play, “Spain,” which is set in 1936, and concerns two filmmakers making a K.G.B.-backed movie about the Spanish Civil War. The production is to be directed by Tyne Rafaeli and to run at the Tony Kiser Theater beginning in November. More

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      A Connection That Began When Sarah Ruhl Made Paula Vogel Cry

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      Paula Vogel: In my advanced playwriting class at Brown, there was an exercise where I asked people to write a play with a dog as protagonist, and Sarah wrote about the dog waiting for the family to return home after her father’s funeral. That was my introduction to her — on the page. I remember weeping at the end of the five pages, running into the next room and handing them to my wife, who also started to cry. I looked at her and said, “This woman is going to be a household name.” And then I discovered she was 20.What’s followed has been 30 years of exchanging writers, books, first drafts. I’m always perplexed when people teach writing and they ask the writers to be insular. Every time we write a play, we’re talking back to Aristotle: We shape the clay of our own work by responding to colleagues who are no longer with us. It’s a much different path for women playwrights — things that our male colleagues like Tom Stoppard or Tony Kushner may get praised for (using poetic language; challenging an audience emotionally) often get resisted when a woman’s voice presents those same virtues.culture banner More

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      Paula Vogel on ‘How I Learned to Drive’ Tony Nominations: ‘I’m Just Thrilled’

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      The playwright Paula Vogel was first nominated for a Tony in 2017, for “Indecent.” Now she has a second Tony nomination for “How I Learned to Drive,” which she wrote in two weeks, 25 years ago. A play about abuse, love and survival, it interrogates the relationship between Uncle Peck and his underage niece, Li’l Bit.The actors who created the roles Off Broadway, Mary-Louise Parker and David Morse, have returned for the play’s Broadway debut, as has its director, Mark Brokaw. Both actors have been nominated, too. Speaking from her home in Wellfleet, Mass., Vogel said she planned to spend the day “doing all of my chores, so I can get on a train and come down to New York tomorrow, which will be exciting.” Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.So how does it feel?It’s more fun and lovely the second time around. This one feels like just a joint celebration with Mary-Louise Parker and David Morse and Mark Brokaw. I mean, we all came back 25 years later. So this is a real phenomenon to me. And I’m thrilled. I’m just thrilled.Why do you think it took this long for the show to come to Broadway?I mean, it’s interesting. Mary-Louise Parker was talking about The Village Voice. The cover was a photograph of that original production. And the headline said, “Too Tough for Uptown.” I remember seeing that and thinking, “That can’t be true.” We do tough things all the time on Broadway. I have to say that this season has made me so happy, with “Pass Over,” with “For Colored Girls.” It’s odd. I actually feel as if I’m home this season in a way that I never have before. I’m starting to accept that it took that much time for the play.And then of course the pandemic meant a further delay.I’m obstinate and stubborn. I held on. These actors have held on, Mark held on, we’ve all held on. We didn’t stop working even during the two years of Covid. We thought about it every day. We communicated our desire to each other every week. So it’s a miracle: that the entire community got through the two years and we’re back, that after 25 years this has transferred to Broadway.You wrote this play as a younger woman and at a time in which our culture was having fewer conversations about abuse. Would you write it the same way now?The difference between now and then is that I’ve grown comfortable with being a survivor. The play has been a gift to me in that it gets lighter every year. It gets farther away, that shore of adolescence and pain. It retreats in a certain way. Would I write it differently? I don’t think I would. There are certain plays in my life that have come out in two weeks. This is one of them. I sat down and didn’t stop. It was just straight from my heart. I don’t think those plays you rewrite.What is it like to watch the same extraordinary actors do the same roles 25 years later?The layers are incredible. You feel these actors processing every moment of their experience. And it makes it deeper and richer. I don’t have words to express how grateful I am to Mary-Louise Parker and David Morse. More