Paula Vogel: In my advanced playwriting class at Brown, there was an exercise where I asked people to write a play with a dog as protagonist, and Sarah wrote about the dog waiting for the family to return home after her father’s funeral. That was my introduction to her — on the page. I remember weeping at the end of the five pages, running into the next room and handing them to my wife, who also started to cry. I looked at her and said, “This woman is going to be a household name.” And then I discovered she was 20.
What’s followed has been 30 years of exchanging writers, books, first drafts. I’m always perplexed when people teach writing and they ask the writers to be insular. Every time we write a play, we’re talking back to Aristotle: We shape the clay of our own work by responding to colleagues who are no longer with us. It’s a much different path for women playwrights — things that our male colleagues like Tom Stoppard or Tony Kushner may get praised for (using poetic language; challenging an audience emotionally) often get resisted when a woman’s voice presents those same virtues.
I worry that we toss away women writers when we reach a certain age, when we’re no longer new and young. There’s a fear of disappearing, so you push a play out before it’s ready. When I ran the playwriting programs at Brown and Yale, I was trying to write despite that 60-to-80-hour-a-week teaching schedule; there are a lot of plays I wish I had held onto longer.
I guess I’m trying to model persistence. Sarah doesn’t need my modeling; she has it. But this is the period in women’s careers — middle age — when we lose a lot of artists. I want my legacy to be, and I think it has been, giving people enough skills that they can support playwriting for their lifetimes.
Sarah Ruhl: Paula was the reason I started writing plays, and the reason I kept writing plays. Even before meeting her, I was drawn to the borscht belt sense of humor she has on the page alongside her profound reservoir of emotion. It’s no accident that the writers and artists whom you have chemistry with in life you have chemistry with on the page, too. Paula used to say reading a play a day makes a playwright: She would meet me for coffee once a week, tell me to write 10 pages and then throw 10 books or plays at me to read.
Putting a female protagonist at the center of a play might sound so simple, but it was rare when Paula started writing [in the 1970s]. But of more consequence to me was her modeling how to be a writer in the world, and how to build a life in the theater over time. She had a way of making young writers feel OK about rejection, like she was inoculating us with resilience.
When she wrote “How I Learned to Drive” (1997) and won the Pulitzer [Prize for Drama], she invited me and two graduate students to Cape Cod — she has this beautiful house overlooking the water. And she said, “I want you to look out over that balcony and say to yourself, ‘This is what playwriting can buy.’” I don’t think any of us ever forgot it.
Interviews have been edited and condensed.
