"The critical reception and audience response to 'How I Learned to Drive' really signaled a breakthrough for my career," said Paula Vogel the day after winning the Pulitzer Prize for the play. Up next: a musical, screenplay
Two years ago, few would have predicted that a play about a pedophile could win a Pulitzer Prize. But Brown playwright Paula Vogel is riding the waves of Pulitzer stardom. Since the awards were announced April 14, her agent in New York has triaged the onslaught of media requests. All this over Vogel's most recent and most successful play, "How I Learned to Drive," whose main character is a complicated - even likable - pedophile. In its praise of the play, the New York Times wrote: "It is hard to say who is the more accomplished seducer in 'How I Learned to Drive' ... Uncle Peck, surely the most engaging pedophile to walk across an American stage, or the woman who created him."
For Vogel, "the critical reception and audience response to 'How I Learned to Drive' really signaled a breakthrough for my career," she said in an interview the day after receiving the Pulitzer. "I don't know how the award has changed my life - I really think that will take another year. I feel like my life changed when this show opened. Psychologically, it's a profound honor to join this group of distinguished writers. But as to what it really means, I'm trying not to think about it. I'm trying to concentrate on getting to work next week and getting the new plays out."
Vogel has no fear of controversial subjects - including AIDS, pornography, prostitution, and gay and lesbian relationships. Her mastery of humor, language and the chiaroscuro of morality are well established. And it really should not be a huge surprise that "Drive" won the Pulitzer: It also won the 1997 Obie in Playwriting, the Lortel Best Play Award, the Best Off-Broadway Play from the Outer Critics Circle, the Best Play from the Drama Desk, and the Best Play from the New York Drama Critics Circle. It is currently being performed at the Century Theatre in New York, directed by Mark Brokaw with David Morse and Mary-Louise Parker, and will return for a Providence run at Trinity Repertory Theatre in May.
Vogel reports that next year will see about 30 productions of "Drive," not just in large theaters in Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and Seattle, but also in South Africa, London, Paris, Germany, Scandinavia and Japan. "We're also talking about movie inquiries," she said, adding, "A lot of this was happening before the Pulitzer."
Winning a Pulitzer may be a hard act to follow, but Vogel is undaunted. On her creative plate is a screenplay of "Drive," which she will be working on this summer. She has been commissioned by Arena Stage in Washington D.C., to write a musical, scheduled for 1999. Vogel is calling it "A Civil War Christmas." It will be a ragtime of the last Christmas of the Civil War. The show will feature Mary Todd Lincoln's seamstress, Clara Barton, Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglas and other important figures of the day, and will combine Civil War ballads with Christmas carols and spirituals. Vogel is also getting the rights to "The Sot-Weed Factor" by John Barthes in order to do an adaptation. "I've wanted to adapt it since I was 15," she said. Also in the works is a production of "The Mineola Twins" at the Roundabout Theatre in New York next year. And in her spare time she has been pitching two musical theater ideas, one working with director Michael Mayer and another with director Hal Prince.
Vogel is in the second year of a two-year unpaid leave from Brown. "I've had a lot of invitations in the last 24 hours to join other Ivy institutions," she said, "... but I hope to come back in some form or capacity.... Brown is so amazing - the colleagues are so wonderful and the students are phenomenal. Wherever I am, I'm not going to stop teaching. I suspect in some ways it's a talent that I have that's equal to my writing. As all these doors open for me, I want to share those doors with younger writers. I have developed the Cockroach Theory to Playwriting. When I get in those doors to those theaters and those studios, I'm going to bring 10 to 12 younger playwrights with me - and multiply. I would love for those playwrights to be Brown playwrights."