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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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.”
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How to have the best Sunday in L.A., according to Keiko Agena
Keiko Agena likes to create moments of coziness — not just on Sundays, but whenever she possibly can.
“Oh, there’s my rice cooker,” she says when she hears the sound in her Arts District home. “We’re making steel-cut oatmeal in the rice cooker, which by the way, is a game changer. I used to have to baby it and watch it, but now I can just put it in there and forget it.”
In Sunday Funday, L.A. people give us a play-by-play of their ideal Sunday around town. Find ideas and inspiration on where to go, what to eat and how to enjoy life on the weekends.
The 52-year-old actor, who played music-loving bestie Lane Kim in the beloved series “Gilmore Girls,” delights in specific comforts like a bowl of warm oats, talking about Enneagram numbers and watching cooking competitions with her husband, Shin Kawasaki.
“It sounds so simple, but I look forward so much to spending time on the couch,” Agena says with a laugh.
It is time that she’s intentional about protecting, especially amid her kaleidoscope of projects. Over the last couple of years, Agena starred in Lloyd Suh’s moving play “The Chinese Lady” in Atlanta, acted in Netflix’s “The Residence,” showcased her artwork in her first feature exhibit, “Hep Tones” (some of her ink and pencil drawings are still for sale), and performed regularly on the L.A. improv circuit. And her work endures with “Gilmore Girls,” which turns 25 this year. Agena narrated the audiobook for “Meet Me at Luke’s,” a guide that draws life lessons from the series, and is featured in the upcoming “Gilmore Girls” documentary “Drink Coffee, Talk Fast.”
She shares with us her perfect Sunday in L.A., which begins before sunrise.
5 a.m.: Morning solitude
I like to be up early-early, like 5 a.m. I like that feeling of everything being quiet. I’ll go into the other room and do Duolingo on my phone. I am a little addicted to social media, so the Duolingo is not just to learn Japanese, but also to keep me from scrolling. Like, if I’m going to do something on my phone, this is better for me. I think my streak is 146. Shin is Japanese, from Toyama. So I’ve been meaning to learn Japanese for a while. For him and his mom.
Then I’ll do [the writing practice] Morning Pages. I don’t know when I learned about Julia Cameron’s book [“The Artist’s Way”] — probably around 2000. I know a lot of people do it handwritten, but I’m a little paranoid about people, like, finding it after I die. So if I have it on my computer and it’s password protected, I can be really honest.
Then a lot of times, I’ll go back to bed. Shin, as a musician, works at night, and so he wakes up a lot later. So I’ll fall back asleep and wake up with him.
9 a.m.: Gimme that bread
I don’t do coffee anymore because it’s a little too tough for my system, but I’ll walk with Shin to Eightfold Coffee in the Arts District. It’s tiny but very chill. Then we’re going to Bliss Bakery inside the Little Tokyo Market Place. We get these tapioca bread balls. If you make any kind of sandwich that you would normally make, but use that bread instead, it ups the game. It’s life-changing. The Little Tokyo Market Place is not fancy or anything, but it has everything that you would want. There’s Korean food. They have a little sushi place in there. You can get premade Korean banchan and hot food in their hot food section. They also have a really good nuts section. It’s just one big table with all these nuts, just piles and piles.
10 a.m.: Nature without leaving the city
We’ll go to Los Angeles State Historic Park near Chinatown. I like that place just because it’s very accessible. Like, they have accessible bathrooms and I’m always checking out whether a place has good bathrooms. We call it Flat Park because it’s a great walk. Like, you’re not really out in nature, but there’s a lot of greenery. You can take your shoes off and at least touch grass for a second.
11:30 a.m.: Lunch and TV cooking shows
One of my favorite salad-sandwich combos is at Cafe Dulce in Little Tokyo. A Korean cheesesteak and a kale salad. That’s always like a — bang, bang — good combo. So we might go there or Aloha Cafe, though it’s not fully open on Sundays. But I love it because I grew up in Hawaii. They have this great Chinese chicken salad and spam musubi and other Hawaiian food that is so good.
We’ll bring home food and watch something. Cooking competition shows are my cream of the crop. My favorite right now is “Tournament of Champions” because it’s blind tasting. To me, that’s the best way to do it. “The Great British Bake Off” is Shin’s favorite. He loves the nature and the accents as much as the actual cooking. He just loves the vibe, the slow pace of the whole thing.
I’m such a TV girl. I love spending time on the couch and eating a meal and watching something that’s appetizing with my favorite person in the world. I’m lucky because I get to do that a lot.
2 p.m.: Browse the aisles
I’ll go to this bookstore called Hennessey + Ingalls. I love art and architecture and design, but you can’t always buy these massive books. But you can go into this bookstore and look at them and it’s always chill.
If I have time, I’ll walk around art supply stores. Artist & Craftsman Supply is a good one. I’ll look at pens, pencils, stickers, tape, washi tape, different kinds of paper, charcoals. In my art, I try to find things that aren’t meant for that particular purpose, like little things in a hardware store that I’ll use it in a different way.
5 p.m.: Downtown L.A. in its glory
We really love to walk the Sixth Street Bridge. It’s architecturally beautiful and they’re building a huge park over there, so we’ll walk around and check it out, like, ‘Which trees are they planting? Can you see?’ We sort of dream about how it’s coming together. But the other beautiful thing about that walk is that if you go at sunset and you walk back toward downtown, it’s just gorgeous. Los Angeles doesn’t have the most majestic skyline, but it’s so picturesque in that moment.
6:30 p.m.: Cornbread and Enneagrams
I’ll head to the Park’s Finest in Echo Park. It’s Filipino barbecue. It’s just so savory and rich and a special hang. Their cornbread is really good. Oh, and the coconut beef, but I’m trying to eat less beef. They have a hot link medley. Oh my gosh, just looking at this menu right now, my mouth is watering. OK, I’ll stop.
One of my favorite things to do is ask friends about their Enneagram number. So the idea of sitting with friends over a good meal and asking them a bunch of personal questions about their childhood and what motivates them and what their parents were like and what their greatest fear is and then figure out what their Enneagram number is? That is a top-tier activity for me.
9 p.m.: Rally for improv
Because I get up so early, if 9 o’clock, I’m ready to go to sleep. But I am obsessed with improv, so on my ideal day, there’d be a show to do. There’s this place called World’s Greatest Improv School in Los Feliz. It’s tiny and they just opened a few years ago, but the vibe there is spectacular.
Then there’s another place where my heart is so invested in now called Outside In Theatre in Highland Park. Tamlyn Tomita and Daniel Blinkoff created it together and not only is the space gorgeous — I mean, they built it from scratch — they have interesting programming there all the time. They’re so supportive of communities that are not seen in mainstream art spaces. It’s my favorite place. Sometimes I’ll find myself in their lobby till 12 o’clock at night. The kind of people I like to hang around are the people that hang out in that space.
11 p.m.: Turn on the ASMR and shut down
I am firmly an ASMR girl and I have been for years. I have to find something to watch that will slow my brain down. Then it’s pretty consistent. I don’t last very long once I turn something on. My eyelids get heavy and it chills me out.
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