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.

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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.

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“I wanted my students to get on Broadway before I did,” says playwright and professor Paula Vogel.

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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.

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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.”

Over the course of his half-century long career, Roger Corman filled America’s drive-ins with hundreds of low-budget movies. They had titles like Sharktopus, Teenage Doll and The Terror. The trailers — and titles — were often better than the movies themselves.

But Corman was also a major figure in American independent film. The directors and actors who worked with him at the beginnings of their careers are a veritable who’s who: Robert De Niro, Martin Scorsese, Jonathan Demme, Francis Ford Coppola.

“I think the task of the filmmaker is to break through and hit that horror that still remains in the unconscious mind,” Corman said. “And there’s a certain amount of catharsis there. He’s pictured above in 2009.

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“I think the task of the filmmaker is to break through and hit that horror that still remains in the unconscious mind,” Corman said. “And there’s a certain amount of catharsis there. He’s pictured above in 2009.

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Corman died Thursday at his home in Santa Monica, California, according to a statement released Saturday by his wife and daughters. “He was generous, open-hearted and kind to all those who knew him,” the statement said. “When asked how he would like to be remembered, he said, ‘I was a filmmaker, just that.’” He was 98.

Corman was educated at Stanford and Oxford Universities before he became the dean of grindhouse. Back in 1990, Corman told NPR about making his first film, Monster from the Ocean Floor. It was the early 1950s, and Corman had read in the newspaper about a company that had invented a miniature submarine.

“I finished breakfast, called them up, said I was an independent filmmaker and would be interested in having their submarine in my picture,” he recalled.

Putting free stuff in the flicks he pumped out for cheap became Corman’s trademark — along with little-known starlets in even littler outfits, filmed on the littlest of budgets. Corman’s thrift was legendary.

Dick Miller acted in dozens of Corman films, including the 1955 Western Apache Woman. “I played an Indian in my first picture and about halfway through [Corman] asked me … Would you like to play a cowboy?” Miller remembered in a Fresh Air interview in 2004. “I said, Doing another movie already? He says, No, in the same movie. So I ended up playing a cowboy and an Indian in my first movie.”

Corman released as many as eight pictures a year — a breakneck pace that rivaled even major studios. Once, as a joke, he borrowed a set (for free, of course) and shot a movie in two days and one night. That hastily assembled movie was the original, black and white, Little Shop of Horrors.

“Possibly the fast pace, the insane schedule, brought something to the picture that made it the more-or-less cult film it became,” Corman said.

Some of Hollywood’s biggest stars got their starts working on Corman films. Above, Salli Sachse and Peter Fonda are pictured on the set of The Trip, a 1966 film written by Jack Nicholson and directed by Corman.

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Some of Hollywood’s biggest stars got their starts working on Corman films. Above, Salli Sachse and Peter Fonda are pictured on the set of The Trip, a 1966 film written by Jack Nicholson and directed by Corman.

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Of course, it didn’t hurt that the film featured a young Jack Nicholson playing a masochistic dental patient.

Nicholson showed up in a raft of Corman pictures, including a relatively well-regarded series based on works by Edgar Allan Poe, all starring Vincent Price.

But Corman was mostly synonymous with schlock — there was The Student Nurses in 1970 (followed by several subsequent nurse-focused films), the 1966 biker gang movie The Wild Angels, and 1975’s homicidal hot rod movie Death Race 2000.

“The drivers are scored not only on how fast they can drive, and how many other drivers they could hit, but also how many pedestrians they could kill,” Corman bragged. “Now that was the key. The picture was the biggest success we had, ever, and it led to all kinds of jokes that entered our era.”

Corman received an honorary Oscar in 2009 for producing and directing more than 300 films and fostering the careers of Ron Howard, John Sayles, Sylvester Stallone and James Cameron.

“Probably all of his movies combined would not have cost as much as Avatar,” Cameron told NPR in 2010.

Corman produced Cameron’s first full-length feature, 1981’s Piranha II: The Spawning, and taught him an essential lesson: “Your will is the only thing that makes the difference in getting the job done …” Cameron said. “It teaches you to improvise, and, in a funny way, to never lose hope. Because you’re making a movie, and the movie can be what you want it to be.”

The movies Corman willed into being are their own loopy, glorious world of teenage cavemen, X-ray eyes and humanoids from the deep. His 300-some movies barely even rose to the level of camp. But many of Hollywood’s most respected directors have at least one Corman credit buried in their resumes. And by teaching so many people how to deliver on-budget and on-schedule, Corman was arguably one of the most influential figures of American film.

In 1964 he married Julie Halloran, a UCLA graduate who also became a producer. He is survived by his wife Julie and children Catherine, Roger, Brian and Mary.