Paula Vogel and Tina Landau at the opening of “Mother Play.” (Photo by Avery Brunkus)
Once begun, the play took just two weeks to write. But in many ways it had been decades in the making. So had the collaboration.
Paula Vogel and Tina Landau have known one another since the 1990s, the same decade Vogel’s late brother Carl and a version of herself first appeared onstage in her play The Baltimore Waltz. Later that decade, a version of her mother would visit audiences in the Pulitzer-winning How I Learned to Drive. So when it came to the question of who would direct Mother Play—Vogel’s latest, now at Broadway’s Helen Hayes Theater, in which memories of her brother, mother, and self interact—Vogel turned to Landau, with whom she’d worked on the 2008 Long Wharf premiere of A Civil War Christmas and its 2012 production at New York Theatre Workshop.
As is typical of both artists’ work, the roots of this current production can be traced even further back than the ‘90s, to both women’s childhoods, to Tennessee Williams and Eugene O’Neill and Clifford Odets and the whole history of American family plays, even to a little known Russian formalist named Viktor Shklovsky and his 1917 essay “Art as Device.” Eager to hear how their collaboration worked and how these influences came together to make the so-referential-it’s-practically-hyper-linked production (which has received four Tony nominations), I spoke with Vogel and Landau via Zoom. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
HOLLY L. DERR: I have so many things I would love to talk to both of you about. My first couple of questions are specifically for you, Paula, and they are about your influences. I’m wondering first about this influence of yours, Shklovsky, and where defamiliarization comes from. I’m wondering, first of all, why is this the first time I’m hearing of him? Is that Stalin’s fault? Why does Brecht get all the credit?
PAULA VOGEL: I feel like Bertolt Brecht was just kind of ripping off other writers and then putting his name on top of theirs. Brecht went to Moscow and came back and “discovered” epic theatre; he “discovered” alienation effect mystically after he went to Moscow, where he actually uncovered Shklovsky and defamiliarization. Alienation effect and defamiliarization are actually the same, only Brecht insists that the alienation effect has a political end, and Shklovsky just said it’s basic human perception: If we keep seeing something so much that we don’t look at it anymore, there comes a point where the thing that we’re stepping over grabs us by the ankle and makes us pay attention. That’s defamiliarization. So I prefer giving credit to the original person who brought that word into the conversation. It’s something I read in grad school.
I feel that Tina does this automatically, and that’s kind of a pun in itself, because Shklovsky talks about automatic perception being what we do in life—that we’re basically sleepwalking through life, and art makes us wake up. For example, in the recent play of mine she directed, she has a series of vignettes about cockroaches. What no one yet has pointed out is that the cockroaches in the very beginning start out more horrific and monstrous and become more mythic; the very last cockroach sequence has sweet little cockroaches coming out of a box. I think this is what we do to our parents: We make them mythological creatures, but with perspective and distance, they’re just sweet little domestic creatures that come out of our boxes.
TINA LANDAU: I heard of Shklovsky through Anne Bogart, and I don’t really know much, but I’ve used the phrase “to Shklovsky something.” Like, if you take an iPhone, you look at an object and you simply like, turn it in a different direction [She turns her iPhone over and shows the image on the back], you’re like, “This isn’t an iPhone, it’s a picture of the constellations.” By simply switching your perspective on something or changing the object itself, you see it as if for the first time, not for its use but for its intrinsic qualities.
PAULA: There were basically the two or three influences in my life—other than every person that I work with, and every new play that’s written impacts me. It’s Shklovsky, María Irene Fornés, and Bert States, who was my teacher. Bert gave me a technique that I could then formulate into my teaching; once I realized how he was doing it, I did it. So I have different categories of language acts and different categories of how plasticity is used and that kind of stuff, but it was really Bert who taught me how to look formulaically, not generically, at playwriting. He was a great writer. He died maybe 20 years ago, but I don’t want his name to go out of fashion. If you pick up Bert today and you read him, you’re like, “Oh my God, I understand the universe in a different way. Wow.” He wrote something called Great Reckonings in Little Rooms, Irony and Drama, and The Shape of Paradox, which is his work on Beckett. They’re just these elegant little essays.
You have talked about different categories of language acts and the concept of plasticity. Is there a word that you use for your plays’ structures? My tendency is to want to call them episodic, but now that I know that you have other influences, is there a better way to talk about your use of structure?
PAULA: You know, it’s interesting because I feel that everything that Tina constructs in the production is actually beautifully prepared in an episodic way. I would also say that we talked a lot about pattern. Viewpoints is incredibly useful; it’s such an incredible way to give us agency for the storytelling. I don’t know if you agree with that, but that’s how I feel—Viewpoints opens up the room for collaboration. I don’t know if you agree with this, Tina, but I kind of think of it as a pattern play.
TINA: Absolutely. Yeah, there are episodes, but at some point I remember the actors saying to me, “Why do I keep going back or keep doing that?” This family kind of goes in these cycles that are variations of a theme over and over and over, and the pattern is built into their pathology, really.
In terms of Viewpoints and composition, how much did those tools serve you, Tina, on this particular play?
TINA: Always and very much. We were very lucky that we did a two-week workshop with the actors. The intent of that workshop was never to get through the whole play or stage the whole thing; it really was to form a basis of vocabulary and intimacy and knowledge of each other. We led with the question of what makes family. I remember the day I was describing Viewpoints and I said to all of them, Jim Parsons and Celia Keenan-Bolger, who I knew were gung-ho and wanted to do it, and then Jessica Lange—I looked at her and I said, “Are you up for Viewpoints?” And she was like, “Oh, yes, absolutely. What is this thing?” I believe that early work is the foundation for everything they are and feel and hold onto as they’re performing. They are the tightest-knit trio.
PAULA: Another thing that brings up in my mind is: What do we do when we’ve been in the American theatre for some time and we’re in it for the process? We’re in it to learn things and find a stimulating process that defamiliarizes us to perhaps our praxis of the last 40 years. I want to go into a room and do things with a group of people that I’ve never done before, or that I don’t know yet how to do. But because of the way we have not endowed the theatre but have treated it like a capitalist product that’s on the marketplace, so the less time spent the better it is for the bookkeeping, we’re trying to figure out how to build a process when it doesn’t exist institutionally anymore. The truth of the matter is, I am bored by the business. I am totally bored by the trappings and the business of theatrical apparatus in this country. I would be perfectly content and happy to spend four weeks in a room and never have it open. This process was just life-giving. I mean, it’s very clear that these three characters are being created by the process, not by me as a writer.
TINA: Paula and I are kindred spirits in the sense of how we are in a room, in our belief that the open heart and the open mind and the many-headed storyteller is better than the one. I would say we run a very open, loose, collaborative room, and these actors really took to that and loved it and reveled in it. That kind of space allowed for a kind of freedom and play and ownership from them with the play and the characters.
There are a lot of ways you two seem like a really good match. You’ve had one collaboration prior to this (on Civil War Christmas), right? I think that really illustrates one thing you have in common: the way that you treat history as source material. Can you tell me a little bit about that first collaboration, and then how the second one came to be?
TINA: Did you just call me and ask me if I wanted to direct this thing?
PAULA: Yeah, I just called you. I had been going down and seeing just about everything I could that you were doing. So I just called you and I said, “Would you consider doing Civil War Christmas?” You said yes.
TINA: Of course I did. Paula and I have been in each other’s orbit since as far back as I can remember in my artistic life, really, and I knew all her plays. What I remember about Civil War Christmas is this impossible task—and I mean impossible in the best way—of telling what felt like hundreds of stories and lives being interwoven through history and narrative and music. And 8,000 costume changes. I remember feeling it as a tapestry that we were making together. Paula’s vision was vast and kaleidoscopic. And it was my favorite way to work.
The thing about Paula that I will say is, and I know maybe one or two other playwrights that I can really say this about, who really get what I believe, which is that the text is a springboard for the event. The ultimate goal is what happens in that theatre on a given night between the performers and the audience. The way she deals with text is as a malleable thing. What works as the test of that is not on the page, but in the space in the bodies of the actors in the moment. The text is like lights or like space or like sound—it’s one of the elements we are using to create the total event. Paula really believes that and lives by it. And every day of rehearsal is proof that she does.
PAULA: The thing I remember of that first process is that I would come in and they would be doing a Viewpoints exercise to start the day, and there was this sense of everybody in the room feeling repletion, feeling we achieved something. It wasn’t about the scene or the text, it was about a conversation that the group was having with each other. Because of that conversation, one of the most meaningful things in my life happened, which is that we celebrated the election of Barack Obama together, in that room, while we were looking back at the context of the Civil War. I think we just sat around in a circle and cried as we talked about what it meant to us.
Tina is a great artist in that the conversation you open is never about history; it’s about history in this present moment that is created. That’s the process of making it three-dimensional: to recognize there is no such thing as a history play. It’s happening today in front of the audience.
So, cut to 16 years later and Mother Play. Paula, did you just call Tina and say, “Do you want to do this play?”
PAULA: Yeah, I did.
TINA: I got an email. It was one line long: “I have a play. Can I send it to you?” And I just said yes. That was my answer.
You didn’t even need to read it.
TINA: No, and I still feel that way. I mean, I will go on record: I will direct anything Paula Vogel writes.
PAULA: Well, I have to say, I have never been as much at peace in a process as I am right now. I have felt enormous peace with this. That’s because it really was me thinking that I wanted to craft a ritual of forgiveness, knowing that I would be absolutely safe, but also absolutely in danger in the very best way.
TINA: What a beautiful tightrope act feat you achieved, Paula, by being open around the table with a story that is your heart and blood and history and self. It’s an amazing balance you were able to find between remaining true to these people who are still very much alive within us and around us and behind us and above us, and honoring the moment in the room and an actor or me saying, “Yeah, but can we change this line?” You really were able to navigate that so gracefully and generously.
PAULA: Well, I feel that I’ve been trained by you. And the fact that I’m writing this play at an age that my mother never lived to see made me aware that there’s a limited amount of time. I better be open now.
I do feel that there’s a narrative about American playwriting that has been written by some of the guys. It takes a very long time for emerging playwrights to work through what I call the Tyrannosaurus Rex theory of playwriting that—and I say this with absolute love—Edward Albee introduced us to. Every comma had better be there in the intonation of the actor. He sat there like a metronome in the rehearsal process. So there’s this energy, and I do feel it’s a masculine energy, that a lot of playwrights have brought into the room. I’m sure you’ve encountered the younger Edward Albees, where not a word can be changed. When I meet people like that, I try to be nice about it and say, “Listen, you might want to think about becoming a novelist, because that’s not what this is.” Thank God for commedia dell’arte, because that’s actually the right attitude: You write the scenario, and you hand it to the troupe and the troupe uses what material they want to. Or if they want to put in a pratfall, that’s great too.
TINA: If you look at the text of Mother Play, there’s a lot written out but not a lot of stage directions, not a lot of instructions about how an actor is meant to feel or play something. And then there are entire stage directions that are like, “And they do a Busby Berkeley number, or something like that.” You know, it’s that kind of openness that’s like: Here’s the spirit, and invent as you will.
I feel like there is a Vogelian way of writing stage directions that not only you write, but also your students. There’s something I tend to notice in their stage directions that tells me they studied with you. What have you told them?
PAULA: I basically say to people: Don’t tell me what the sofa looks like. Tell me how the sofa feels. Is the sofa having a depressing day? There was a one stage direction in a Heather McDonald play called An Almost Holy Picture: “The sky is the color of disappointment.” I remember reading that and saying, That’s exactly right. Don’t tell me about the lime green of the sofa in a Tennessee Williams play. Tell me that he bought the sofa after going through a binge, and it was such a hideous color of green that when he sobered up, the sofa seemed to be getting bigger and bigger and bigger in his living room, and he fled to Mexico. It’s more like looking for a kind of emotional, spiritual animus in things that really can’t be acted or directed, if that makes sense.
Of course, I’ve always done: “Write something that’s impossible to stage.” That was a very early thing. For example, I love the stage directions in Eurydice by Sarah Ruhl; I just think they’re exquisite. I think this goes back to what so moved me about Tennessee Williams: He gave me slices of his memory. Can you direct Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, knowing what he puts in the middle of his stage directions, “I’m reminded of a photograph I saw when I was five years old of Robert Louis Stevenson’s veranda”? Does that help you direct the play? Does it help you act Maggie? Maybe. But for me, as a reader, I’m suddenly going, Oh my God, he’s talking directly to me. So here’s my question: Can I talk directly to my collaborators and to my readers and give them the synapses in my brain that they can completely ignore? I don’t want to direct the play and I don’t want to act the play. I shouldn’t. I feel like a lot of stage directions do.
TINA: I had never thought of this before, but I think it would be accurate to say that most of the time, whether I am interested in a play is based on the opening stage directions. Like, I remember when I first read Tarell McCraney’s In the Red and Brown Water, the first thing I directed by him, where he describes something about a line of people like Yoruban gods. I remember thinking, “I’m in.” I remember the same thing with William Saroyan’s Time of Your Life. That’s my hook, much more than what happens in the first scene or how the dialogue is written. It’s kind of what the initial gesture is, what it holds, the quality or evocation of it.
PAULA: This is also why I’ve gotten so hooked on Branden Jacobs-Jenkins. The description of the sound of the swamp on the first three pages of Appropriate is absolute genius.
Specifically in this case, how did you communicate what you wanted for the “Phyllis Ballet”—the long, wordless scene later in the play, in which Jessica Lange holds the stage with a series of seemingly mundane but telling private actions? How did you tell your collaborators what you were looking for there?
TINA: In the script, there was a very specific and, unbeknownst to me at first, brilliant laying out of a series of actions. From the first day, Paula said, “Take what you will, leave what you will, make your own, add, subtract.” When Jessica and I started working on it, the first thing we did was everything Paula wrote. We just followed it like a sacred map. Then very quickly, within probably the first afternoon of rehearsal, I called Paula and was like, “Do you mind if we take out a whole section?” Of course she was fine with it, but I really appreciated it. The truth is, when I went back and mined it, I discovered it was way more thoughtful and intentional and full of meaning than I had realized at first in how Paula originally laid it out. We tried to remain true to what we discovered in that.
PAULA: I think that should be done with all new plays. That openness should be there. I just had a tiny little moment of recognition, which is that I think I started opening up when I first worked with Anne on Baltimore Waltz, because I realized there was no way I could capture my brother; he was dead. Therefore, I just had to give it over, because no one was ever going to know him the way I did, or look like him, or sound like him; therefore, this was entirely a theatrical creation. Once I could embrace that with him, I started realizing that everything I did can only be created by my collaborators in the room. It just moved me away from the—you know, I shouldn’t call it the Edward Albee model, but the insistence on authorship, which I think really gets in the way.
I think it’s fair. He’s on the record being that kind of playwright.
PAULA: And listen, he was a brilliant guy. I used to get into fights with him over rewrites. I really enjoyed my arguments with him.
I have this tendency, because I teach history and theory as well as directing, to group plays and people in baskets by genre or oeuvre or category. I was trying to think about in which baskets I would put you two. It seems to me that you are both postmodernists to a certain degree. Is that a word that resonates with you?
PAULA: The thing about postmodernism is it existed before post- and modern. I think that we’re holding onto theatricalism. Theatre in the 20th and 21st century in America absolutely dotes upon stage realism and naturalism and Method acting. I’m not opposed to those things, but I prefer to know that I’m in a theatre and in a performance. That’s just me. I do believe in the mechanism of distancing that the stage can give us, so that at times we pull out and go back into it. I don’t know. Tina, do you consider yourself postmodern?
TINA: Me? I don’t even know what that term means. I mean, I’m not being coy. Holly, can you tell me what you think postmodern means? Then I can respond to it.
Right, part of it is this relationship to history. Mother Play has this relationship to the canon and to The Glass Menagerie that seems very postmodern to me. That’s one aesthetic characteristic of postmodernism, that often pieces are in dialogue with the previous phases of theatre or other iterations of theatre or art.
PAULA: Okay, and my response to this comes straight from Bert States. I did it in a workshop, I cannot find it written, but Bert basically groups all art movements into three stages. The naïve stage, when it’s first being made by collaborators, and the audience doesn’t know what it is and neither do the makers. We’re going to cut up words and draw them out of a hat. What do we call it? Dada. And then you go into the sophisticated: We’re going to cut up words and put them into a hat, but we know how to do it, and the audience knows how it was made. We’re all sophisticated in the vocabulary, and then we move into decadence, where we know it.
Take realism. Somebody says, “Let’s strap up sides of beef, put a butcher shop onstage, and we’re going to call it realism. The blood is going to drip on the stage.” Right? But then you get sophisticated, and you start using mood lighting and whatever else, and the audience knows. And then you move into decadence. If you just look at the works of Ibsen, you go through all three stages. Everyone does. To what you’re calling postmodern, I might say: Decadence basically quotes its own history. Euripides quoted his own history to Greeks. Sondheim quotes his own history in the way that he quotes from his actual music in his later work, like Passion. So yes, we’re quoting the canon, but that could also be decadent realism. I feel that we’re labeling a separate movement what may actually be the natural decay of the 20th century in terms of the theatrical art form.
TINA: I’m learning a lot about myself in this conversation. What I’m learning is: Oh, right, these are things I used to think about a lot, and I don’t anymore. I’m being really candid. It’s like, I have no idea. I’m not thinking about anything about my history or theory or other artists when I go into the theatre and work these days. I’m so in the present moment, and all I care about is making something that is alive and vital and necessary in the moment. Everything else you’re talking about, is like—I don’t even know what any of that means right now.
PAULA: I actually think that that is the hallmark of a mature artist. I don’t think about these things when I sit down to write. It’s just what comes out. But because I still do, for example, occasional workshops with veterans or with people who’ve never written. I’ll give an example. I think it’s now your second nature in the way that, for example, you basically crafted a through line with the rabbit that refers to the history of Baltimore Waltz—the way that people gasp when Celia brings it out of the box, because of your staging.
TINA: There is an entire secret language and history in the music of this production of Mother Play that no one knows but me. There are Easter eggs and jokes and references, playing with what year it is and what movies were out that year, and what movies my parents produced, and how Jessica’s action is timed to the music in the thing. You know what a lot of it is, Paula: I made a choice to not use any music with words in the whole play. It’s all instrumental, but all those pieces have words. So if you know the words and you’re hearing the words during certain moments of what someone is doing onstage, it is very funny or enlightening.
My last question is, if these days you’re not thinking about theory and you’re not thinking about history, then what are you thinking about? What’s on your mind?
TINA: Life and death. People dying. Redwood trees. Nature. My relationship with my loved one. You know, I feel like my themes these days are circling around time and just what it means to be most fully alive. That’s what I’m thinking about.
PAULA: Those are great things. I think in very similar ways. I think a lot about time because I’m in the last portion of my life. I’m thinking a lot about younger generations and watching their stories after 30, 40, or 50 years, and I’m so happy that I’ve lived long enough to watch their narratives. I feel like now I just want to be open to whoever walks through the door in my house and let everything go for a while. This is such a strange field and profession, and it’s a blessing, but it’s really necessary to be able to step away and soak in as much daily life as we can.
Holly L. Derr (she/her) is a director, writer, and head of graduate directing at the University of Memphis.
