In this volume, Lee Brewer Jones examines Paula Vogel as both a
playwright and renowned teacher, analyzing texts and early reviews of
Vogel's major plays-including Indecent, Desdemona, How I Learned to
Drive, and The Baltimore Waltz-before turning attention to her
influence upon other major American playwrights, including Sarah Ruhl,
Lynn Nottage, and Quiara Alegría Hudes. Chapters explore Vogel's plays
in chronological order, consider her early influences and offer detailed
accounts of her work in performance. Enriched by an interview with Lynn
Nottage and essays from scholars Ana Fernández-Caparrós and Amy Muse,
this is a vibrant exploration of Paula Vogel as a major American
playwright.
By the time Paula Vogel made her Broadway debut with her 2017 Rebecca
Taichman collaboration Indecent, she was already an accomplished
playwright, with a Pulitzer Prize for How I Learned to Drive (1998)
and two Obie Awards*.* She had also enjoyed a brilliant career as a
professor at Brown and Yale with students such as Sarah Ruhl, a
MacArthur "Genius" Grant winner, Pulitzer Prize winners Nilo Cruz,
Quiara Alegría Hudes, and the only woman to win two Pulitzers for
Drama, Lynn Nottage. Vogel's theatre draws upon Russian Formalist Viktor
Shklovsky and uses devices such as "defamiliarization" and "negative
empathy" to challenge conventional definitions of protagonists and
antagonists.
