How She Learned to Thrive

Political theater. Feminist humor. Moral ambiguity.

To many, these sound like oxymorons. To Paula Vogel, they are such stuff as plays are made on.

For more than two decades, the playwright has been forging drama from subjects that often make people want to look the other way. She has written about the feminization of poverty, the legacy of AIDS, partisan politics, lesbian parenting, pornography, prostitution and other hot-button topics--all with a deft mix of topicality, theatricality and wit.

This may not sound like the path to mainstream success, but it seems to have taken Vogel there anyway. Indeed, her 22nd play, “How I Learned to Drive,” opens at the Mark Taper Forum on Thursday, directed by Mark Brokaw and featuring Brian Kerwin and Molly Ringwald.

A complex meditation on a protracted sexual relationship between a girl and her uncle, “How I Learned to Drive” not only won the 1998 Pulitzer Prize, the Obie and various other awards, but was also the most-produced new drama on American stages last year, according to American Theatre magazine. Another Vogel play, “The Mineola Twins,” featuring Swoosie Kurtz, opened Thursday at the Roundabout Theater in New York.

Such popularity is not what you might expect, particularly in the age of the Spice Girls and “Ally McBeal,” from someone who says proudly that her “principal focus as a dramatist from day one has been contributing to the notion of female subjectivity in the drama.”

Then again, Vogel is hardly your average highly successful lesbian feminist playwright. Indeed, for all the kudos that have come her way since “How I Learned to Drive” made its off-Broadway splash two years ago, she remains driven by a passionate belief in the ancient function of theater as a forum for civic discourse.

“To me, the stage is a medium for processing the things that we want to avoid, the things that we want to look past,” says the 47-year-old writer, whose gentle demeanor belies her strong opinions. “It’s the only medium I know of in which the audience is part of that discourse. And it’s a civic discourse, because you’re surrounded by your neighbors.”

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The story is all too familiar: A young female gets involved with a much older married man. When people find out, there’s the usual talk about who did what to whom. But the more the details are revealed, the more ambiguous it starts to look. Was it all his doing, or did she go after him too?

This may sound like the back story for the Clinton-Lewinsky saga, but it’s also the arc of “How I Learned to Drive.” In fact, it’s hard to miss the resemblance between the drama that’s been in the news for many months and the one about to take the stage at the Taper.

Certainly, the similarity hasn’t escaped Vogel. “The success of the play has to do with the timing,” the playwright says. “Had it come out five years before, I don’t think this would have happened. I couldn’t have predicted this, and I don’t think it has anything to do with talent.”

Others would disagree. “It’s a very clear-eyed examination of a very singular relationship and, at its heart, a particular kind of love story,” says Brokaw, who won Obie, Drama Desk and Lucille Lortel awards for his direction of the play.

“The subject matter is potentially volatile, but the structure makes you constantly redefine your expectations about this story, and about what you should be feeling about this story,” he says. “It has humor where you wouldn’t think that would be possible.”

Vogel may not take credit for the fortuitous timing, but neither does she deny it. Obviously, she was tuned in to the zeitgeist. For the Clinton-Lewinsky melodrama has unfolded, and Vogel’s play has been playing, amid a culture obsessed with the broader topic of so-called sexual harassment for years now.

Rooted in the rising tide of identity politics, political correctness and victim culture, the subject came to the fore in the media during the 1991 Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings. The following year, playwright David Mamet caught the theatergoing audience’s attention with “Oleanna,” a short drama pitting a male college professor against a female undergraduate who accuses him of sexual harassment.

Since then, there has been much discussion of how to regulate sexual interaction between those who have institutional power and those who do not. The debate hinges on the question of consent, or whether when there’s an imbalance of power, the less powerful person (usually a woman) can be said to have participated consensually.

Nowhere has this debate blazed with more heat, albeit largely out of public view, than on college campuses. And that, not coincidentally, is where Vogel has spent much of her time in recent years.

“It is no accident that I wrote this play at age 44-45, after spending 14 years on a university campus, watching the raging discussion of sexual harassment,” says Vogel, who until recently headed the graduate program in playwriting at Brown University, where she remains on the faculty. “I very much wanted, as an older person, a feminist, to say, ‘Wait a moment: [A younger woman] taking responsibility is not [the same as] blaming the victim.’

“Taking responsibility allows us to get out of a rut of victimization that Jerry Springer shows and all of them have been encouraging us to dwell in, which to me is disempowerment,” she says. “I wanted to give some gesture, some gift of empowerment, to my younger students.”

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Set in the late 1960s and ‘70s, “How I Learned to Drive” is told largely in nonlinear flashback and from the perspective of a fatherless young girl named Li’l Bit (Ringwald) who becomes entangled with her aunt’s husband, Uncle Peck (Kerwin), when she’s 11 and he’s 38. Many of the pivotal scenes take place during a series of erotically charged driving lessons between the uncle and his niece.

While not an autobiographical play, “How I Learned to Drive” derives strength from Vogel’s ability to empathize with both major characters. “What is so refreshing is that there is no clear black and white, no clear villain,” Brokaw says. “No one is painted as a victim. It’s also not sentimental. The play is disturbing because it challenges your point of view.”

As one who has taught and mentored, Vogel can relate to Peck. He is, after all, someone who actually seems to care for Li’l Bit and encourages her, ultimately, to become strong enough to reject him. Similarly, Vogel’s concern with the empowerment of young women may come from having had a less than easy start herself.

Raised in Washington and Maryland, the young playwright watched her divorced mother struggle to keep her job as a secretary while raising two kids, Paula and her brother Carl. (A third sibling, Mark, grew up with their father.)

Carl was only a couple of years older than she was, but he became a pivotal influence on Vogel. Indeed, her first major play, “The Baltimore Waltz,” is a homage to her beloved sibling, who died of AIDS in 1988. In the lighthearted drama, a schoolteacher goes on a European vacation with her brother. Partway through, the audience realizes that the brother has actually already died, and that the trip is the woman’s fantasy.

Carl, in fact, was the one who first insisted that Vogel get an education--which she did, at Catholic University and then Cornell. Drawn to such playwrights as Bertolt Brecht, Howard Brenton and Caryl Churchill, Vogel steeped herself in English and German dramaturgy.

One thing these writers had in common was their political interest, and that led Vogel to the theory behind such work. “I started reading this Russian philosopher, Victor Sklovsky,” she recalls. “He’s the person that Brecht stole the alienation effect from, and he basically said that the purpose of art is to estrange life, to make us look at it differently. So if you follow that, necessarily, you’re going to be political.”

The eroticization of children is one issue that fairly begs for artistic estrangement. And it’s a subject Vogel had long wanted to treat dramatically, specifically by reworking the “Lolita” story from the female’s point of view.

“I literally have had this [interest in “Lolita”] in my head for a good 15 years,” the playwright says. “But I couldn’t write the thing until I knew what the visual metaphor was. Then maybe about four or five years ago, I saw an image.”

The image that finally came to mind was that of a woman driving a car, adjusting the rearview mirror, when a dead man materializes in the back seat. “I saw the first image and it was out of screenplay, it wasn’t out of a play,” Vogel says. “But I knew that I could adapt it to the theater.”

In the finished play, the image of a woman driving remains key, along with the issues of power, control and self-determination that such a metaphor suggests. And the piece’s reverse chronology is, as it turns out, evidence of yet one more way in which teaching has influenced Vogel’s writing.

One of the plays that the playwright lectured about gave her the key to structuring her piece. “I sensed when I started teaching Pinter’s ‘Betrayal’ that the structure of going in reverse was a very interesting structure,” she says. “And I thought that absolutely feels right.”

Yet for all that her writing has been shaped by reading and teaching, Vogel was motivated perhaps most of all by her feminism. For despite the advances of the past few decades, she feels that women remain at a disadvantage in the world of theater.

“When male characters step on stage, they are trailing the legacy of Hamlet, so that there’s the notion of an individuated subject that transcends a particular societal role,” she explains. “And when Everywoman steps on stage, she is trailing the legacy of Gertrude or Ophelia, which is a much different legacy.

“I still think that women in this country --particularly in movies and television, but also in drama-- are very much subjugated to the notion of decorum: This is a good wife, this is a good mother, this is a good daughter, this is a bad daughter,” Vogel says. “It’s all about our role. [The point is] constructing female character that transcends or is not connected to role.”

In addition to “How I Learned to Drive,” Vogel has pursued that goal with such plays as “The Oldest Profession,” which is a comedy centering on a klatch of aging hookers, and “Hot ‘n’ Throbbing,” which is about pornography. In the satire “The Mineola Twins,” the subject is the ideological poles of left and right in America, as embodied by a set of twin sisters.

Nor does Vogel feel that she’s alone in wanting to create roles in which women can be seen as subjects rather than objects. “I’m very fortunate in my generation,” she says. “In the past 30 years, there’s been an explosion of women dramatists. There’s a very rich circle now, trying to create new possibilities for what femaleness means onstage.”

Yet for all her outspokenness, Vogel is still somewhat reluctant to call herself a political writer. “I do consider myself political, but not in the sense that I have one political ideology,” she says.

She continues to act politically, though, through her writing and teaching. The principal difference that success has wrought is that she’s now in the process of shifting the relative proportions of those two aspects of her work.

“I’m making teaching my hobby and writing my life, instead of the reverse, which I had done,” Vogel says. “I’m now going to be a kind of honorary professor and artist in residence at my home university.”

Indeed, she almost has no choice, given how busy she’s become. With a number of plays in progress, Vogel is also working on a screenplay of “How I Learned to Drive,” as well as other projects.

Fortunately, the shift toward writing more feels like a natural progression to Vogel. “I’m going to change from mother to godmother,” she says. “I’m going to be there in the background giving what I can, but I’m not going to wash the dirty dishes.

“I’ve now had some great generations of theatrical children. It’s time to tie my tubes.”

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“How I Learned to Drive,” Mark Taper Forum, 135 N. Grand Ave., downtown. Tuesdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7:30 p.m.; Saturdays-Sundays, 2:30 p.m.; no performance March 21. $29-$40. Ends April 4. (213) 628-2772.