Paula Vogel

It's 1962, just outside of D. C., and matriarch Phyllis is supervising her teenage children, Carl and Martha, as they move into a new apartment. Phyllis has strong ideas about what her children need to do and be to succeed, and woe to the child who finds their own path. Bolstered by gin and cigarettes, the family endures or survives the changing world around them. Blending flares of imaginative theatricality, surreal farce, and deep tenderness, this beautiful roller coaster ride reveals timeless truths of love, family and forgiveness.

The fourteenth winner of the Yale Drama Series prize explores “Blackness” and the reasons why joy and peace might be harder to get than we think What does it mean to be safe when you’re a person of color in the United States? If you were given the chance to leave and create a utopia, would you? Is utopia possible with all of our subconscious bias? Rachel Lynett’s highly satirical and funny play is set in the fictional world following a second Civil War. Bronx Bay, an all-Black state (and neighborhood), is established in order to protect “Blackness.” When Jules’s new partner, Yael, moves into town, community members argue over whether Yael, who is Dominican, can stay. Questions of safety and protection surround both Jules and Yael as the utopia of Bronx Bay confronts within itself where the line is when it comes to defining who is Black and who gets left out in the process. The play is the fourteenth winner of the Yale Drama Series prize and the first one chosen by the Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Paula Vogel.

"The play is steeped in a gentle lyricism we associate with nostalgic portraits of American youth. The tone, the setting, the characters seem at first so familiar, so, well, normal, that it's only by degrees that we sense the poison within the pastels. By then we feel both locked into, and complicit with, this portrait of a warping relationship. That's the art of Drive."--Ben Brantley, The New York TimesPaula Vogel's widely celebrated masterpiece, How I Learned to Drive, winner of the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and many other accolades, is published here for the first time as a stand-alone edition. Following a disjointed timeline of the twisted dynamics between Uncle Peck and his young niece L'il Bit, the story unfolds through her perspective, detailing the murky transformation she underwent. Known for its dark subject matter, the work demonstrates the result of child abuse on identity and the discovery of strength through trauma. Paula Vogel's play, How I Learned to Drive, received the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, the Lortel Prize, Drama Desk, Outer Critics Circle and New York Drama Critics Awards for Best Play, as well as winning her second Obie. Other plays include The Baltimore Waltz, Desdemona, And Baby Makes Seven, The Long Christmas Ride Home, A Civil War Christmas, and Don Juan Comes Home from Iraq. She also has a distinguished career as a teacher and mentor to younger playwrights, first at Brown University and most recently at the Yale School of Drama.

"Indecent reminds us of the power of art to tell us truths long before we are able to recognize them as such." -- Los Angeles Times"Indecent sheds an eye-opening light on a little-known time when theatrical history, Jewish culture, and the frank depiction of homosexuality intersected, with explosive results." -- New York TimesWhen Sholem Asch wrote God of Vengeance in 1907, he didn't imagine the height of controversy the play would eventually reach. Performing at first in Yiddish and German, the play's subject matter wasn't deemed contentious until it was produced in English, when the American audiences were scandalized by the onstage depiction of an amorous affair between two women. Paula Vogel's newest work traces the trajectory of the show's success through its tour in Europe to its abrupt and explosive demise on Broadway in 1923--including the arrest of the entire production's cast and crew. Paula Vogel's play How I Learned to Drive received the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, the Lortel Prize, Drama Desk, Outer Critics Circle and New York Drama Critics Awards for Best Play, as well as earning Vogel her second Obie. Other plays include The Baltimore Waltz, Desdemona, And Baby Makes Seven, The Long Christmas Ride Home, A Civil War Christmas, and Don Juan Comes Home from Iraq. She has also had a distinguished career as a teacher and mentor to younger playwrights, first at Brown University and currently at the Yale School of Drama. Based on real events, a provocative new drama from a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright about one of Broadway's greatest controversies

The Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright of "How I Learned to Drive," Paula Vogel, has crafted what The New York Times has declared "an ambitious, richly detailed and beautiful new seasonal offering." Set on a chilly Christmas Eve during the latter days of the Civil War, "A Civil War Christmas" weaves a tapestry of fictional and historical characters, such as President and Mrs. Lincoln -- together with holiday music, marches, hymns and spirituals of the period--to tell a story of companionship and communal hope arising from one of our nation's darkest hours. This volume features a conversation between the author and noted historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, commentary on the music of the Civil War and its singing soldiers and excerpts from historical journals such as that of Walt Whitman. A Civil War Christmas, declared "The Best Play of the Year" by the Hartford Courant, premiered in 2008 at Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven, CT under the direction of Tina Landau.

Past and present collide on a snowy Christmas Eve for a troubled family of five. From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of How I Learned to Drive, this beautifully written play proves that magic can be found in the simplest breaths of life.