The heart is one of the few organs that has both biological and metaphorical meaning. Biologically, it keeps a person alive, pumping blood throughout their body, and sending oxygen to their cells. It has walls, chambers that function like rooms, and valves that function as doors into and out of each chamber. It is also a well-worn metaphor. A relatively tiny organ connoting a widespread, indescribable human emotion—love. A trite-but-true metaphor simultaneously suggesting the elusive spirit, the contested soul, the highest joys, and the deepest sorrows. Paula Vogel’s writing embodies the vast meanings held within the word heart. Her plays are an expression and celebration of love, both its pains and its comforts. Courageously, she lives and writes with her heart on her sleeve, or rather, her heart on the page.
From The Baltimore Waltz (1992; Obie Award) to How I Learned to Drive (1997; Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1998) to Indecent (2015; Tony nomination, Best Play), Vogel has accumulated several accolades honoring her impressive body of work. Her plays are known for being boundary-pushing and politically minded, scrutinizing gender, womanhood, class, and queerness through the lens of family or found-families. And yet, for a playwright touted for her political prowess—her plays deal head-on with the violence at the core of homophobia, censorship, polarizing political ideology, childhood sexual abuse, and misogyny—Vogel says that her writing “isn't actually guided by issues.” Instead, she asserts, her writing is guided by her experiences and her life, rather than a particular opinion or point of view. Herein lies Vogel’s strength—her radical vulnerability. It’s a vulnerability she pairs with an unexpected and singular sense of whimsy and humor. She wields both in equal measure, with one informing and enhancing the other. From using bawdy and farcical humor to deploying music or puppets, Vogel embeds playfulness and magic in all of her writing, even the plays that deal with unspeakable tragedies. The stark contrast between hard-hitting truths and fantastical theatrical gestures disarms. Her plays surprise the senses, and by doing so, encourage her audience to reencounter their life, their love, and even their trauma with new heart.
In every play she writes, Vogel looks for “places where I send a message to my late brother Carl.” Vogel’s brother Carl died of AIDS in 1988, and Vogel has not only embedded messages to him in her writing, but has joyfully celebrated queerness by honoring the complexities of living in this world as a queer woman. Vogel is specific and expansive in explicating the violence and homophobia her queer characters face, without letting them overwhelm their joyful and resilient spirits. While scrutinizing the homophobia within American culture, she gives queer characters a voice and a power to imagine new stories for themselves. In And Baby Makes Seven (1984), a lesbian couple is expecting a child with the gay man they’ve recently added to their relationship, but must first grapple—hilariously and then existentially—with the three imaginary children they created for each other earlier in their relationship. The play is strange and serious, hilarious and thought-provoking, as it analyzes the complexities of parenting, queerness, and notions of “respectability.”
In her one act The Long Christmas Ride Home (2003), Vogel’s messages to Carl live inside the story of a family with two queer children and one straight child. The play follows the kids as they grow from children to adults. It recalls her family dynamic, living as a queer woman with her gay brother Carl and her straight brother Mark, and meditates on the complexities of those relationships. It explores familial abuse and cyclical trauma, while still implementing a sense of magic through Bunraku puppetry and dance. In all of her work, Vogel doesn’t shy away from contradictions: she yells with anger, cries with grief, and laughs with love in the same breath, exploring even the deepest sadness and trauma with an eye oriented towards the magical, the fantastical, of life. This magic ultimately feels like a method of relief, escape, and processing for her characters as Vogel filters their trauma through fantastical worlds. At the end of Christmas Ride Home, joke-cracking Stephen—a character reminiscent of Vogel’s brother Carl—is resurrected as a ghost. With magic and laughter as her talismans, Vogel lets her audience intimately explore the deepest and darkest holes in their hearts without losing hope—because there is always a fantastical reality within our reach. Vogel not only traverses the line between laughing and crying, but also the hair’s breadth between the living and the dead, that last inhalation and exhalation which leaves a candle smoking. She says of her late brother Carl, “There’s no such thing as true autobiography on stage.... it’s not possible... but there’s this sense of, ‘Is there any way that I can have Carl speak for himself?’” Vogel has twice featured Carl’s own words in her work: a letter he wrote to her detailing, with Vogel-ian raunchy humor and spirit, the specifics of his funeral, appears in both The Baltimore Waltz and her newest work, The Mother Play. Vogel reignites theatre’s power to commune with those we have lost. She says that “in terms of spirituality when it comes to theatre, you are dealing with, literally, the undead.... characters are bringing to life the sense of humans that don’t exist... I consider myself extremely spiritual.” With every play she immerses her audience in the wax remnants and smokey air of personal past spirits, a ritual of rebirth and remembering, from her brother Carl who died from AIDS in 1988, to her mother Phyllis, to the multiple past selves that live within her today. And yet still, the same raunchy humor and heartfelt laughter that fills the pages of Hot ’N’ Throbbing (2000) and Desdemona: A Play About a Handkerchief (1994) fills the pages of these personal and grief-filled vigils.
Across her astounding body of work spanning 50-plus years, Vogel serves as an architect and host, warmly welcoming her audience into her heart-home, sculpting an endless mansion of imaginative rooms, or rather plays, for them to inhabit. As they traverse the landscape of Vogel’s heart-home, moving from magical room to magical room, play to play, connections and throughlines abound, with Vogel’s DNA—biologically and figuratively—on every page. An avid Vogel reader starts to feel intimately close to the playwright, finding in each successive play not only new theatrical modes, but also new, prismatic versions of her family, Carl, her love and her loss.
With her newest work, The Mother Play, Vogel remembers the spirits of her mother, her brother, and her past self. The play serves as a culmination of several rooms inhabiting her heart-home, with familiar characters but new meaning. The play serves as an origin story and a forgiveness ritual. Vogel says she’s been “calling this play Mother Play for 15 years... because it’s my mother play,” and it is perhaps the deepest Vogel's audiences have ever been into her heart-home. Taking place in Washington DC where Paula grew up, The Mother Play unpacks Vogel’s memories of growing up with her mother and brother under the poverty line over the course of five evictions in her mother’s life. (Paula actually had two brothers, the oldest of whom lived with their father after their parents’ divorce and is not a character in the play.) However, in true Vogel fashion, this memory play includes drag performances, dancing cockroaches, and laughs throughout. She says of her mother Phyllis: "My mother really enjoyed How I Learned to Drive, which she saw right before she died... she just laughed so much at her own character, and I thought ‘Well, ok, let me give you more lines, mom. I really think my mother would be honored.”
In pursuing an aesthetic that jumbles hard truths with bawdy humor and insists on the afterimage of the dead, Vogel’s work teaches its audiences to remember. She traces and re-traces the outline of the scars and imprints people have left on her heart, courageously staring into the face of pain and mortality with laughter in her heart. Vogel strives for an art that wakes its audience up, observing “If we keep seeing something so much that we don’t look at it anymore, there comes a point where the thing that we’re stepping over grabs us by the ankle and makes us pay attention.” Paula Vogel means to wake her audience up, grab them by the ankle and, by her example, remind them to continuously re-approach their love, their imaginations, their memories, their grief, and their traumas with new heart, humor, and spirit.
—Ella Talerico