Paula Vogel Takes The Wheel To Broadway

Sometimes the road to Broadway can take many turns. In the spring of 2020, Paula Vogel’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, How I Learned to Drive, was in rehearsal and set to open in New York when theaters across the country suddenly closed due to the pandemic.

But would this challenging play about sexual abuse—which took more than two decades to mount a Broadway production return when theaters reopened?

On April 19, the production will open on Broadway starring Mary Louise Parker and David Morse both back from from the play’s Obie-winning, off-Broadway production 25 years ago, staged by its original director Mark Brokaw. After a long career of being one of the leading female American playwrights, How I Learned to Drive is only Vogel’s second play to make it to Broadway. The other was Indecent, which also began its life at the off-Broadway Vineyard theater before moving to the main stem.

“In many ways, I was grateful for this time,” says Vogel of the pandemic pause from her home in Wellfleet on Cape Cod, where she lives with her wife, author Anne Fausto-Sterling.

For Vogel, the time gave her the chance to work on a wave of projects, including producing a dozen works on-line by other playwrights in the “Bard at the Gate” project for the McCarter Theatre Center in Princeton, N.J.

Another was writing her first memoir, Travels Without Carl, based on her cross-country road trip when she visited women’s bars through the Deep South and West, following the death of her brother from AIDS in 1988. She also continued her playwriting workshops on-line, including a one specifically for veterans. Vogel, an acclaimed playwriting professor, mentor, and theatrical guru (with many students going on to earn Pulitzer Prizes and Tony Awards of their own) is also halfway through a book on the art of playwriting.

Not enough? Waiting in the wings is a project for directors Marianne Elliott (Company) and Steven Hoggett (War Horse), based on the novel They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? which was made into a Sydney Pollack film in 1969 starring Jane Fonda. And, oh yes, she even started a new play. Too early to talk about that one, she says.

Right now, Vogel is focused on the Broadway bow of How I Learned to Drive and is curious to see how this provocative story would be received….|CONTINUED|