Editor’s Note: Paula Vogel is a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright. She has written The Baltimore Waltz, How I Learned to Drive, Hot N Throbbing, Desdemona, The Mineola Twins, The Long Christmas Ride Home, And Baby Makes Seven and The Oldest Profession. Elena Mora conducted this interview.

PA: One article referred to you as a working-class girl from Washington, DC. How has that been a part of your life as an adult woman?

PV: It’s been huge. It switches when I start to think about the components of identity that I feel. If I’m doing, for example, a ladies’ high tea in Providence, Rhode Island, I feel like there’s a big old “L” on my forehead. If I am in a room with Protestants, I feel Jewish. If I’m in a room of Jewish people, I feel like a goyim.

It’s interesting in terms of the theater as well. That little chip on my shoulder becomes a huge log that I wish I could put down but never can. Even now I feel at times that entertainers are a servant class for the rich. I have been rebuked for the way that I dress. I am aware of the way I dress, and I choose not to “dress,” even on special occasions. I’m not going to dress up; I’m not going to pass.

It’s very significant. One of the stories that I should write up for the Brown alumni magazine is about the first year that I was at Brown. I was in a relationship with a woman who had MS, and we had no healthcare. I took the job because we were living in New York, doing five jobs, both of us artists, and I knew we had to get out of New York. So I took the job, and I was the lowest paid professor here. We lived in a very urban, poor neighborhood. So I’m paying for her MRIs out of my pocket. I did not have any credit cards, and I still had Salvation Army clothing, and a cold winter was coming. I got my first credit card on the basis of my job. I went to a nice department store, called Cherry Webb and Turner, and I bought my first store-bought, new coat. It was a warm coat; I loved it. I was doing a new play festival, and I’d brought the coat, left it somewhere and out of the pocket fell the sales slip. I came back into the room, and students had found the sales slip and were saying, “who the hell buys from Cherry Webb and Turner?” They were just whooping it up. In that moment of shame I should have confronted them and I didn’t. I thought, it was my first year there, and I had to act the part of the professor. I didn’t come in and say “excuse me, I think I dropped that.” I still beat myself up 20 years later for not going in there and saying, “Do you know what this means to be able to walk into a store and buy clothing?”

For me, and this is where my little chip becomes a log, theater should be accessible to everybody, and this is my own personal fight to make it accessible.

PA: But isn’t it accessible?

PV: It is and it’s not. It’s deceptive. We have never figured out how to produce art in this country. The culture has successfully made sure that we are going to be entertainers of the ruling class, the rich. Now thanks to the Reagan administration, the first Bush administration and the current Bush administration there has been an all-out fight in the NEA to make sure that happens.

PA: How? Funding cuts?

PV: Funding, yes, but also making artistic directors extremely sensitive and paranoid in terms of what they direct. Making sure that theater companies can only survive according to single-sale ticket sales rather than subscriptions. They have pushed back the foundations of not-for-profits, the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Pells and the Chafees and the Kennedys. So that war has been lost. We are now nothing more than a backdrop for cocktail parties for the ruling class.

I have to say that’s in New York. One of the reasons I no longer live there is that it’s too depressing for me to think that that’s what theater is, a marketplace. I don’t know how to exist in the marketplace; I don’t do well there. Outside New York it’s not like that. It’s still struggling, but there are places that survive with young artists who believe that – and this is the way I feel – we are public servants of the community. We should not be elitist; we shouldn’t be thinking “oh, art for art’s sake.” It doesn’t exist in this country. It doesn’t exist period.

PA: In theater especially?

PV: That’s right, theater is a social-political form. It’s a collective art form that is always about a dialogue. It doesn’t mean that one can’t be experimental as well as social realist. This is where I diverge from a Brechtian view. But there’s still a political-social dialogue. There’s no way the theater can be anything but that.

So I say that it’s not that we don’t need more new plays. We do. I think everybody should write. I think everyone is a writer, an artist, a musician, a dancer. The arts are innate; they are human. We are censored out of becoming artists. Chekhov was a doctor; Wallace Stevens worked in an insurance company. Art has to be a daily bread, an individual daily bread, a spiritual daily bread, a collective daily bread. And the way that you eradicate that is to censor it out from elementary schools, you cut the arts programs. It is collective arts that make us citizen participants in a collective forum. This is another reason I think the arts are being attacked. They don’t want us in collective forums, where we disagree, get emotionally moved and upset, and getting at what’s true, being in a room together and watching each other.

I wish we all had the Iowa caucus model. I wish we all had to stand up and spend three hours in a room debating each other. To me that’s a function of theater. What we need are new producers, new ways of producing, new theater companies. It’s not enough to be a playwright – you have to be someone who knows how to write subscription copy and do advertising, the whole nine yards.

The people who are really subsidizing the arts are the artists by taking extra jobs. The truth of the matter right now is that people like Jimmy Smits, Mary Louise Parker, Laura Linney or fill in the blank, turn down six figures in the movies to do an off-Broadway or a Broadway production for $1,000 a night.

PA: Is that a new thing – big stars doing theater?

PV: It’s happened in the last 10 years but now it’s crucial because government and foundation support has been undercut, and the only way we can subsidize theater is with single, box office ticket sales. And people go to see a Jimmy Smits.

I always had hoped that theater would be something one did the way one was an accountant or worked in a bank: a form of work. Nothing special about it. I never realized that we were heading to what I call gladiatorial entertainment era where everything is about celebrity, about gossip, everything is about the event. This is not art. Art, and the conversation about art, has disappeared. We are simply providing entertainment for the emperor – that’s what art is right now. I never in a million years thought we’d get to this point.

But then I go to Providence, or particularly, this little theater company in Alaska, which made me an artist. The people in that company are loggers and fishermen, an attorney for the state of Alaska, they work for the Park Service. They do Chekhov and they do Paula Vogel. And they are brilliant artists. When I go there, I teach adult education; I teach high school students. I do outreach; I do whatever community work needs to be done. That’s plus what one does in the theater. There isn’t a division, where I am a specialized, isolated artist. Alaska can’t afford that; everyone has to work. And part of your work is doing the theater. It’s crucial work because the nights are long and cold and dark, and we need to do things other than drink our brains out. The happiest years I’ve spent were working one play a year in Alaska for ten weeks doing an adult community play writing workshop.

So this is my idea of theater. My idea of theater is saying to the artist, “You have to produce in your own theater, start your own theater, find umbrella organizations, like senior citizen communities, after school programs, juvenile offender programs, working in theater as a kind of psychological therapy, whatever it is, some kind of community work and particularly with children.” If you look at sports, it has replaced theater. What happens with sports is that every child participates in baseball, football or whatever. Therefore as adults they feel that they are citizen participants in sporting events. Of course sporting events never critique society. It’s a way that we are all put together en masse and diverted through the Super Bowl rather than the upcoming elections.

PA: What about theater as therapy? I ask because I think it’s similar to how the left and the Party in particular have seen the gay rights issue i.e., there’s always been something of a negative attitude about things that are seen as personal or emotional.

PV: We do not mention names in theater, but it’s phenomenally wonderful at this moment in time that there’s Tony Kushner. Because quite frankly I also don’t think that the Party has done the work in terms of homophobia and sexuality. Gays and lesbians have been scapegoated by very progressive groups. I have been hazed in very well intentioned ways by fellow travelers.

PA: I wanted to get into more discussion about the issue of gay rights. When we leap and say the issue is suddenly important, it’s too mechanical, it’s made too political. Yes, Bush and the ultra right are horrible on all these issues, but it’s not just about them and how they persecute and exclude.

PV: The difficulty with any single issue is if you support that issue, it’s your priority. It’s not working with a complex of issues that you get into some murky areas. For me, femaleness is probably my first primary identity. Does the issue of birth control impact me as a 52-year-old? No it doesn’t. But I consider it to be one of the issues that will determine who I vote for. The right to choose is a primary issue because that determines everything about the possibility of everything. I’ve had arguments where somebody says, “Really? You’re not going to vote for this Democrat, because they’re pro-life?” I say, “Yeah, I’m not going to vote for that Democrat.”

The fact is that there are extremely reactionary conservative homosexual men who are beyond Log Cabin. What do I have in common with them? I’ll bond with straight women rather than the Log Cabin Republican men who have expendable funds so it doesn’t matter what happens. It does not make me feel any better about the Bush administration that Dick Cheney has a daughter who is a lesbian and a representative of Coors beer. This does not make me feel there’s tolerance here; it’s window dressing.

PA: He does the same with everyone else, with women, Black people, Latinos.

PV: And we’re smart enough to know what window dressing is and to know how this is a cynical political machine.

PA: I was excited about doing this interview, but I thought yesterday, why did I agree to do this? I don’t know anything about theater!

PV: But of course you do! Everybody is an expert on theater. Why shouldn’t you be an expert on theater? You have no idea the kind of interviews that playwrights go through with people who really know nothing, on Good Morning America, where you get in front of a TV anchor who asks, “So what are you writing, a film?”

PA: What are you working on right now — that’s the kind of thing you’d be asked.

PV: I have a season of my work being done at the Signature Theater in New York, which is great. It starts in September. I’m the third woman they’ve done in 14 years. It’s the only company that I know of in the US that does seasons of one playwright. So it’s a magnificent opportunity, and it’s a little overwhelming. So we’re figuring out what the season is going to be, and I want to return to a play that I feel has been censored. Censorship is denied in America, but it’s there.

Here I am at age 52 about to rewrite a play about the oldest profession: aging prostitutes in New York City and Reaganomics. I’ve done a lot of research about prostitution. But no theater company would ever produce this play in 1980 when I wrote it. Since then, it has been optioned for film six times. We’re possibly going to do a film version that’s completely different from the original cast, but it’s hard to raise $3 million dollars with an all-female cast of aging women.

I actually did research back in the 1980s with a group of working women. I worked with a woman who ran a project to legalize prostitution out of Judson Memorial Church. She had the women read the play and then meet with me to tell me what was accurate and what was not. It was mind blowing. I said at the time, “If this opens, I’d love you to come to opening night.” They said, “Yeah, if you have opening night at five in the morning we’ll do it.”

So I am aware as I work in theater of how writers of color, women writers and particularly lesbians, if you transgress in certain ways, you are not going to be produced. It’s not true that the best plays get produced. The best plays get written, put in a drawer and then people think, “Gee, I’d better become, say, a lawyer, and do something with this passion I feel, become a public advocate, or become a social worker.” People who have brilliance and talent just know that they’re not going to make it in theater.

For the end of the season, I am looking at a play about battering that cost me a lot to write and no one else would touch. But if it’s not done with this company, no one will ever produce it. Nobody wants to talk about domestic violence. It is the scariest play I’ve ever written, the hardest play I’ve ever written.

PA: Do you think that’s taboo — domestic violence?

PV: A lot of men feel guilty, therefore they don’t want to watch it. They think I’m male bashing, because they know I’m a lesbian writer. The difficulty is that I don’t believe in bashing. Secondly, a lot of women are scared about how close they are to this. They are currently in that relationship, or they have friends who are in that relationship. Of course when you confront the situation by calling it domestic violence we have put it in a category where we don’t look at it. We have found ways to function, labeling it rather than really looking at it.

So how to look at this in such a way? In the same way that when I wrote Baltimore Waltz, which touched me personally, and I had to realize from the get go that there were people every night in the theater who were dying of AIDS. So every night in the audience there are going to be men who watched their fathers batter their mothers.

PA: On another important subject a question is how do you think people change, how does change happen with people – that’s a very important question for activists. You must think about that.

PV: This goes back to the empathy-alienation effect and to feeling and thought. Theater has to make us feel about thought, and it has to make us think about feeling. So that means we have to be permitted to feel. I don’t think catharsis is anti-change, as long as there’s distance on the catharsis. We must feel, grieve, mourn, laugh, we must have emotional responses. The play has to be framed in a way that it is clear that it is a play world, it is not life. It is a visualization, a projection. In essence, I think audience members have to write the play themselves, we should be arguing as we go into the lobby after the play. One of the essential things, and it’s a subjective thing, is that I have to feel that when I’m watching a play that I’m seeing truth telling. And truth telling makes me uncomfortable. That’s the other thing, the reason there’s such an attack on theater is that we’re now uncomfortable with truth telling. Instead of enjoying being uncomfortable - theater could make us enjoy being uncomfortable, that’s why it’s dangerous.