In this volume, Lee Brewer Jones examines Paula Vogel as both a playwright and renowned teacher, analyzing texts and early reviews of Vogels major playsincluding Indecent, Desdemona, How I Learned to Drive, and The Baltimore Waltzbefore turning attention to her influence upon other major American playwrights, including Sarah Ruhl, Lynn Nottage, and Quiara Alegría Hudes. Chapters explore Vogels 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. Vogels theatre draws upon Russian Formalist Viktor Shklovsky and uses devices such as defamiliarization and negative empathy to challenge conventional definitions of protagonists and antagonists.
