Lifestyle
In honor of Mother's Day, here's 'Mother Play' — which gestated for 40 years
Playwright Paula Vogel is known not just for her work on Broadway — but for the generations of famous playwrights whose careers she has nurtured. Above, Jessica Lange in Paula Vogel’s Mother Play.
Joan Marcus/Second Stage
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Joan Marcus/Second Stage
Playwright Paula Vogel is known not just for her work on Broadway — but for the generations of famous playwrights whose careers she has nurtured. Above, Jessica Lange in Paula Vogel’s Mother Play.
Joan Marcus/Second Stage
To most of the public, Paula Vogel is best known for her moving, highly theatrical plays, among them How I Learned to Drive, Indecent and her latest work, Mother Play, starring Jessica Lange and up for several Tony Awards. But since 1984, she has taught scores of younger playwrights – first at Brown University, then at Yale.
“I love teaching as much as I love writing,” said Vogel. “So, this is, actually, for the last 40 years, has been something of a juggling act, because I always miss doing the other one.”
Over the years, her former students have won Tony Awards and Pulitzer Prizes and have been produced on and off Broadway.
“I wanted my students to get on Broadway before I did,” Vogel said. “I wanted my students to get produced at theater companies that I would never be produced in. And, you know, I always think of this as kind of one stop shopping; come in as an emerging playwright and leave the room as my colleague.”
“One of the first things she said, the first day I met her, was, ‘When a door opens for you, you hold it open and you let one other person through,’” said Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Quiara Alegría Hudes, perhaps best known for writing the script and screenplay for In the Heights. “And that’s her. Except for, she’s really holding the door open and like, hundreds of people are coming through. She teaches you about the ethics; not just playwriting structure and style, but the ethics of living a life as a writer, as an artist. She models that.”
A lifelong mentor
“I wanted my students to get on Broadway before I did,” says playwright and professor Paula Vogel.
Second Stage
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Second Stage
“I wanted my students to get on Broadway before I did,” says playwright and professor Paula Vogel.
Second Stage
Vogel, who grew up in the Washington, D.C., area, frequently writes out of personal experience – sometimes painful personal experience. Her breakout play was The Baltimore Waltz, which dealt with her brother’s dying of AIDS.
MacArthur Grant-winning playwright Sarah Ruhl said she studied with Vogel at a particularly vulnerable time in her life.
“I met Paula when I was 20, and my father had just died of cancer, and I was back at Brown and I was having a little trouble focusing,” Ruhl said. “And Paula really understood how grief shapes an artist, and, also how to help artists out of that muddle and into their work.”
In fact, Ruhl’s breakout play, Euridyce, sends the title character to Hades where she meets her dead father.
When two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Lynn Nottage first met Vogel, she was planning to go to journalism school and didn’t realize that playwrighting was a career path for women.
“I was taking a playwriting seminar class, and she walked in and she was still a young, ambitious playwright figuring out how to teach playwriting,” said Nottage. “And I found her to be warm and generous and nurturing and encouraging and really inspirational in ways that fed my spirit.”
Her former students said it wasn’t just their spirits being fed. “She would take me to this place, Café Zog in Providence on Wickenden street and we’d have a cookie,” Ruhl said. “And, you know, she would feed her writers.”
They still meet for the occasional cookie. Or drink.
Lynn Nottage recalled that when she and Vogel made their Broadway debuts in 2017, they frequently met for drinks, because they felt they weren’t getting the support from the media and the Broadway community that they had hoped for.
“So, I think that having an ally and having a sister and having someone, literally, I could hold hands with and, you know, fight the powers-that-be, really emboldened me and allowed me to survive that.”
She added that although Vogel is a kind person, she is also “a badass…she also does have that side that demands to be heard and demands to be seen and that is an advocate and fighter for other writers’ voices.”
“There are no classroom boundaries, I think, around the mentorship that Paula creates and fosters,” said Ruhl. “It is lifelong.”
Vogel and her wife, Anne Fausto-Sterling, officiated at Ruhl’s wedding.
“I’ve actually officiated at a number of former students’ weddings, which, has become one of my hobbies,” Vogel said. “I love doing it.”
All three playwrights have become teachers themselves, and friends with one another. Hudes said she and Vogel share early drafts of their plays. “I have read Mother Play. And I think it’s her best play, and I don’t say that lightly. I am in awe of her body of work.”
The birth of Mother Play
Jim Parsons and Jessica Lange in Mother Play.
Joan Marcus
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Joan Marcus
Yet while Vogel may have become a nurturing teacher and colleague, Mother Play makes it clear that her own mother wasn’t particularly nurturing.
Jessica Lange plays the fictional version. “In the play, Phyllis makes some absolutely unforgivable decisions and then really pays the price for it, lives with those consequences for the rest of her life,” Lange said.
Vogel said Mother Play had a 40-year gestation period and it’s her homage to the many mother plays written by men. “
“When I was sitting at the dinner table with my mother, my brother and I could quote Glass Menagerie at each other, have a little private joke, and get through dinnertime,” Vogel said. “But I was curious as to what is the difference when women write mother plays.”
Set over 40 years, her mother play is written with empathy and forgiveness. The audience sees the struggles this single mother goes through, with money, with alcohol, with her gay children, with loneliness. And all within the context of the constraints of the time period in which she lived.
“Maybe Paula existed in sort of resistance and rebellion to her mother,” mused Lynn Nottage. “You think about the path that Paula has taken is that she never had biological children of her own, but she has this immense, beautiful family in the theater world. And that’s really a blessing.”
Jessie Buckley has been nominated for an Academy Award for best actress for her portrayal of William Shakespeare’s wife in Hamnet.
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Kate Green/Getty Images
Actor Jessie Buckley says she’s always been drawn to the “shadowy bits” of her characters — aspects that are disobedient, or “too much.” Perhaps that’s what led her to play Agnes, the wife of William Shakespeare, in Hamnet.
Buckley says the film, which is based on Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel, offered a chance to counter a common narrative about the playwright’s wife: that she “had kept him back from his genius,” Buckley says.
But, she adds, “What Maggie O’Farrell so brilliantly did, not just with Agnes and Shakespeare’s wife, but also with Hamnet, their son, was to bring these people … and give them status beside this great man. … [And] give the full landscape of what it is to be a woman.”
The film is nominated for eight Academy Awards, including best actress for Buckley. In it, she plays a woman deeply connected to nature, who faces conflicts in her marriage, as well as the death of their son Hamnet.
Buckley found out she was pregnant a week after the film wrapped. She’s since given birth to her first child, a daughter.
“The thing that this story offered me, that brought me into this next chapter of my life as a mother was tenderness,” she says. “A mother’s tenderness is ferocious. To love, to birth is no joke. To be born is no joke. And the minute something’s born into the world, you’re always in the precipice of life and death. That’s our path. … I wanted to be a mother so much that that overrode the thought of being afraid of it.”
Jessie Buckley stars as Agnes and Joe Alwyn plays her brother Bartholomew in Hamnet.
Courtesy of Focus Features/Courtesy of Focus Features
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Courtesy of Focus Features/Courtesy of Focus Features
Interview highlights
On filming the scene where she howls in grief when her son dies
I didn’t know that that was going to happen or come out, it wasn’t in the script. I think really [director] Chloé [Zhao] asked all of us to dare to be as present as possible. Of course, leading up to it, you’re aware this scene is coming, but that scene doesn’t stand on its own. By the time I’d met that scene, I had developed such a deep bond with Jacobi Jupe, who plays Hamnet, and [co-stars] Paul [Mescal] and Emily Watson, and all the children and we really were a family. And Jacobi Jupe who plays Hamnet is such an incredible little actor and an incredible soul, and we really were a team. …
The death of a child is unfathomable. I don’t know where it begins and ends. Out of utter respect, I tried to touch an imaginary truth of it in our story as best I could, but there’s no way to define that kind of grief. I’m sure it’s different for so many people. And in that moment, all I had was my imagination but also this relationship that was right in front of me with this little boy and that’s what came out of that.
On what inspired her to pursue singing growing up
I grew up around a lot of music. My mom is a harpist and a singer and my dad has always been passionate about music, so it was always something in our house and always something that was encouraged. … Early on, I have very strong memories of seeing and hearing my mom sing in church and this quite intense mercurial conversation that would happen between her, the story and the people that would listen to her. And at the end of it, something had been cracked between them and these strangers would come up with tears in their eyes. And I guess I saw the power of storytelling through my mom’s singing at a very young age, and that was definitely something that made me think I want to do that.
On her first big break performing as a teen on the BBC singing competition I’d Do Anything — and being criticized by judges about her physical appearance
I was raw. I hadn’t trained. I had a lot to learn and to grow in. I was only 17. I think there was part of their criticism which I think was destructive and unfair when it became about my awkwardness, or they would say I was masculine and send me to kind of a femininity school. … They sent me to [the musical production of] Chicago to put heels on and a leotard and learn how to walk in high heels, which was pretty humiliating, to be honest, and I’m sad about that because I think I was discovering myself as a young woman in the world and wasn’t fully formed. … I was different. I was wild, I had a lot of feeling inside me. I could hardly keep my hands beside myself and I think to kind of criticize a body of a young woman at that time and to make her feel conscious of that was lazy and, I think, boring.
On filming parts of the 2026 film The Bride! while pregnant
I really loved working when I was pregnant. I thought it was a pretty wild experience, especially because I was playing Mary Shelley and I was talking about [this] monstrosity, and here I was with two heartbeats inside me. Becoming a mom and being pregnant did something, I think, for me. My experience of it, it’s so real that it really focuses [me to be] allergic to fake or to disconnection.
Since my daughter has come and I know what that connection is and the real feeling of being in a relationship with somebody … as an actress, it’s very exciting to recognize that in yourself and really take ownership of yourself.
I’m excited to go back and work on this other side of becoming a mother in so many ways, because I’ve shed 10 layers of skin by loving more and experiencing life in such a new way with my daughter. I’m also scared to work again because it’s hard to be a mother and to work. That’s like a constant tug because I love what I do and I’m passionate and I want to continue to grow and learn and fill those spaces that are yet to be filled — and also be a mother. And I think every mother can recognize that tug.
On the possibility of bringing her daughter to travel with her as she works
I haven’t filmed for nearly a year and I cannot wait. I’m hungry to create again. And my daughter will come with me. She’s seven months, so at the moment she can travel with us and it’s a beautiful life. And she meets all these amazing people and I have a feeling that she loves life and that’s a great thing to see in a child. And I hope that’s something that I’ve imparted to her in the short time that she’s been on this earth is that life is beautiful and great and complex and alive and there’s no part of you that needs to be less in your life. You might have to work it out, but it’s worth it.
Lauren Krenzel and Susan Nyakundi produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Beth Novey adapted it for the web.
Bruce Campbell
I’m Battling Cancer
Published
Bruce Campbell has revealed he has cancer, but says it’s a type that’s treatable, though not curable.
“The Evil Dead” actor shared the news Monday in a message to fans, writing, “Hi folks, these days, when someone is having a health issue, it’s referred to as an ‘opportunity,’ so let’s go with that — I’m having one of those.” He continued, “It’s also called a type of cancer that’s ‘treatable’ not ‘curable.’ I apologize if that’s a shock — it was to me too.”
Campbell said he wouldn’t go into further detail about his diagnosis, but explained his work schedule will be changing. “Appearances and cons and work in general need to take back seat to treatment,” he wrote, adding he plans to focus on getting “as well as I possibly can over the summer.”
As a result, Campbell says he has to cancel several convention appearances this summer, noting, “Treatment needs and professional obligations don’t always go hand-in-hand.”
He says his plan is to tour this fall in support of his new film, “Ernie & Emma,” which he stars in and directs.
Ending on a determined note, Campbell told fans, “I am a tough old son-of-a-bitch … and I expect to be around a while.”
Neve Campbell in Scream 7.
Paramount Pictures
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Paramount Pictures
The OG Scream Queen Neve Campbell returns. Scream 7 re-centers the franchise back on Sidney Prescott. She has a new life, a family, and lots of baggage. You know the drill: Someone dressing up as the masked slasher Ghostface comes for her, her family and friends. There’s lots of stabbing and murder and so many red herrings it’s practically a smorgasbord.
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