ABSTRACT
Paula Vogel, an American playwright, was born in 1951 and educated at Bryn Mawr College, Catholic University, and Cornell University. Having worked at a range of jobs (from secretary to packer for a moving company to factory worker), Vogel lectured at Cornell on women’s studies and theatre before becoming artistic director of Theater with Teeth in New York. Author of numerous plays, including Swan Song of Sir Henry (1974), The Oldest Profession (1981), And Baby Makes Seven (1986), The Baltimore Waltz (1992), and Hot ‘n’ Throbbing (1992), Vogel ‘[l]ike Brecht, writes from a deeply rooted political sense’ (Savran 1996: xi). Since 1985 she has been an associate professor and director of the Graduate Playwriting Program at Brown University. Winner of numerous fellowships and awards, including the Pulitzer Prize in 1998 for How I Learned To Drive (a response to Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita), Vogel articulates a particular brand of feminism described by David Savran as ‘the result of contradictions that molded her when she was growing up’ (1998: 17). From a mixed religious background – her father was a New York Jew (who left the family when Vogel was eleven), her mother a New Orleans Catholic – and a working-class family, as well as a lesbian who came out when she was seventeen, Vogel eventually gravitated toward both an academic and a theatrical career.
