Theater Matriarch Paula Vogel Brings Revised The Mother Play to Studio
The DMV native talks to City Paper about the state of the art form, ancient Greece, and the genre of “mother plays.”
By D.R. Lewis
November 7, 2025
This review originally appeared in Washington City Paper.
It comes as a surprise when Paula Vogel—the frank and fearless Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright whose expansive body of work has tackled topics as challenging as incest, antisemitism, homophobia, and sexual violence—describes herself as the aspiring “Grandma Moses” of the American theater.
She means that, at 73, she has no intentions of slowing down: A revised version of her latest work, The Mother Play: A Play in Five Evictions, opens at Studio Theatre this month, a memoir with Penguin Press is forthcoming, and a stage adaptation of They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? with director Marianne Elliott and choreographer Steven Hoggett is in the works. She also has a number of percolating ideas for musical projects.
But as far as style, the two couldn’t be less alike. If Moses’ work is primitive, Vogel’s is defined by structural inventiveness; if Moses extols the virtues of pastoral American agrarianism, Vogel is much more interested in mining the deepest, darkest parts of ourselves and society.
“I got into this field because I totally believed that theater was invented around the same time as the Greeks tried their first effort at democracy, and the theater and democracy go hand in hand as a public art form,” she tells City Paper. “Greek senators had to go to the theater and watch something like Medea. They had to watch a play about their own xenophobia with foreigners and immigrants, and with a woman as protagonist. Can you imagine that in the 4th century B.C.? ‘Senators, you’re gonna vote for war? Great. Now we have to watch you spend an entire evening with Trojan women so you can see the result of what we’re doing as a country.’ That’s pretty astounding as an invention for free speech.”
The individual durabilities of free speech, democracy, and theater have all been subject of recent debate, and it’s evident that Vogel, a native of the D.C. area who now lives on Cape Cod with her wife, Dr. Anne Fausto–Sterling, is thinking on expansive, national scales. Though regional theater has exploded since Vogel’s childhood (sparked, in part, by Arena Stage founder Zelda Fichandler), federal arts funding has not—at times even facing outright elimination. But Vogel’s prolific career as a playwright, which began decades before making her belated Broadway debut in 2017, was built on private arts grants and regional stages, and when Studio Theatre officially opens The Mother Play on Nov. 16, it will be the third Vogel play the company has produced.
Like much of her work, The Mother Play is episodic, and it covers several decades as Phyllis (played by veteran D.C. actor Kate Eastwood Norris) raises two gay children and attempts to come to terms with their sexuality. It represents something of a homecoming, staged only a few miles from the various apartments in which Phyllis Vogel raised Paula and her brother Carl (played by Stanley Bahorek), who died from AIDS-related complications in 1988. Vogel admits the proximity is a bit spooky, especially considering The Mother Play is the final piece in what she calls “the Maryland plays.”
“I consider this a prequel to The Baltimore Waltz,” she says, referring to her 1992 play that imagines a European vacation with Carl that never occurred. “I so admire writers like August Wilson and Tennessee Williams, who create a great big circle of different times in a story that they’re telling. I wanted to do something like that.” She hedges that The Mother Play is only a semi-autobiographical work, though. “I don’t think there’s any possibility of theater being autobiographical and the reason that is so is that the characters are really created by the actors and the director. According to how Kate brings the two-dimensional page to life, it’s going to be her creation. And there’s no way that you can encompass someone’s life and personality in 80 or 90 pages.”
Vogel had three weeks to build the play before it premiered on Broadway in April 2024; Studio’s staging has afforded her an opportunity to revisit and hone the work. Among the changes are the reinstatement of a pivotal scene for Phyllis—“I told friends that if they wanted to know who my mother was, I would tell them about this incident”—that didn’t work in New York. “You have to think about, ‘how do we clear the stage, how do people make exits and costume changes?’ And I just couldn’t get there,” she says. But she has now. “It’s what, I would say is, … Phyllis Herman‘s finest hour, because, in truth, she’s a character and not my mother. … This is a slice that’s inspired by my mother.”
There’s one other seemingly small, but ultimately profound, change. Vogel has added “The” to the title, emphasizing the play’s place in what she considers a genre of “mother plays” that counts Eugene O’Neill and Tennessee Williams—and Long Day’s Journey Into Night’s Mary Tyrone and The Glass Menagerie’s Amanda Wingfield, respectively—as its mascots. But Vogel isn’t writing to imitate those characters; she’s writing to expand the scope of mothers such plays reflect, and in her signature manner.
“Amanda had a veneer of gentility, whereas I feel that my mother and single women who got divorced or abandoned in the 1960s, in working-class Prince George’s County, needed to be of harder stuff,” Vogel says. “Women couldn’t get their own credit cards because they didn’t have their husband’s name on it. It was an incredible struggle. It still is. And for women who are mothers under the poverty line, I think you start going more in the direction of [Bertolt Brecht’s play] Mother Courage [and Her Children] … We’re human beings who make mistakes in our living room. We make mistakes as daughters. We make mistakes as mothers, fathers, sons, and everyone else in the spectrum.”
Vogel is not a mother herself, but has functionally raised generations of playwrights as a professor at Brown University and Yale University. She counts Sarah Ruhl, Lynn Nottage, and Nilo Cruz among her students, and though she no longer is regularly in the classroom, she continues to host immersive, site-specific workshops she calls “bake-offs” and reads several hundred plays a year.
“I get so excited when I read new plays that I have a hard time sleeping,” she says. That excitement is at odds with a funding model that is making it harder to earn a living as a working playwright (as a number of well-regarded playwrights described to the New York Times earlier this year). “I always knew that the price of my dignity, which is necessary to write, would be 80-hour work weeks, which is what I’ve done pretty much since I’ve been 21,” she says. “Theater is probably the only form that’s a quick form to write. I don’t know how writers who have families and are struggling for health care can write a novel.”
But hard work and long hours alone cannot fix a broken model, especially as incubators like the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center face existential financial crises that have shuttered like-missioned organizations in recent years. Vogel worries that the foundation on which playwriting careers are built is on the verge of collapse, exacerbated by politically motivated attacks on arts funding. “I’m very aware that in the next decade, we stand in danger of losing an entire generation of playwrights.” She’s not ready to reveal details, but she has an idea for addressing the problem.
“I think human nature means being an artist, and what happens is [our society] suppresses artistic expression starting in grade school,” she says. “It’s so important for empathy and understanding, for each person to be able to synthesize how they feel as individuals … I feel that we have relegated the arts as something that’s not serious.”
Even if she’s not a “Grandma Moses,” or a mother, Vogel’s status as the reigning matriarch of American drama is clear, and she’s deadly serious about the form’s capacity for social change. She continues to add to her catalog, to question our relationships to ourselves and each other. If “mother plays” are a genre of their own, maybe we’d do well to accept that “Vogel plays” are too.
Previews for Paula Vogel’s The Mother Play: A Play in Five Evictions start on Nov. 12; the play opens Nov. 16 and runs through Dec. 21 at Studio Theatre. studiotheatre.org. $42–$102.
Paula Vogel (center) with the cast and crew on the first day of rehearsal for The Mother Play at Studio Theatre. Credit: Avi Littky