Paula Vogel by Joanna Mansbridge

Abstract

Reviewed by: Paula Vogel by Joanna Mansbridge Jennifer E. Popple Paula Vogel. By Joanna Mansbridge. Michigan Modern Dramatists series. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014; pp. 232. In 2012, Patrick Healy, writing for the New York Times, reported on Paula Vogel’s playwriting “boot camp” at Second Stage Theater. Second Stage was producing the first revival of Vogel’s Pulitzer Prize–winning How I Learned to Drive, and she began this workshop with a challenge: to “write a scene that would be impossible to stage.” While most participants envisioned a physical impossibility, Healy reflected on Vogel’s Drive, asserting that the entire play would be impossible to stage if written by anyone other than Vogel. It is this topic, writing about and staging the “impossible,” that forms the through-line of Joanna Mansbridge’s 2014 treatise on Paula Vogel. In this well-researched and -constructed monograph, she focuses on Vogel as an artist of “defamiliarization” (7). Mansbridge, an assistant professor of American studies at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey, speaks to Vogel’s purposeful contradictions, her push to make everyone in her audience, no matter their political or social leanings, “see differently” (7; emphasis in original). The book is one of the strongest pieces I have read on Vogel, as Mansbridge avoids neat conclusions about the playwright, clearly explains and applies Vogel’s dramaturgical theories to her work, and conducts a thorough investigation of the plays. She also constructs a complex and connected through-line not seen before. It is a worthwhile text for the upper-class theatre classroom and for scholars and enthusiasts of the playwright’s work, as it is both academic in scope and approachable in writing. In her introduction, “A Dramaturgy of Defamiliarization,” Mansbridge details Vogel’s multitude of contradictions. Vogel, an avid feminist who writes female characters who are complicit in the misogynist culture around them, even to their detriment, points to August Strindberg as “an extremely powerful ally” (5), constructs theatrical worlds that are neither completely realistic nor completely avant-garde, teaches her student playwrights without actually teaching (8), and constructs plays that must be presented in the theatre even if they contain “impossibilities.” In this elucidation of her dramaturgy, Mansbridge drives home her conclusion that Vogel writes to destabilize her audiences in order that they see the issues she writes about in the complicated ways in which they exist and are experienced by the characters in the plays. Mansbridge asserts that Vogel, as a materialist, is interested in how history “[shapes] bodies and consciousness” (12), a theme that she follows throughout her analysis of Vogel’s works. In the book’s seven chapters, Mansbridge cleverly applies Vogel’s dramaturgy of destabilization to her own methodology. She never allows the reader to go too far down one road of analysis before destabilizing that interpretation and offering an alternative, continuously encouraging the reader to approach the plays without arriving at one set of meanings. In these chapters, Mansbridge helps with this thematic destabilization with an organized approach to the playwright’s complex material. She approaches Vogel’s canon historically and thematically, discussing the plays in their order of publication and pairing them when appropriate. In chapter 1, “Gender and Authority: Meg and Desdemona,” she dissects Vogel’s earliest works, arguing that these two plays present Vogel’s early interest in feminist criticism and her immersion in the theatrical canon, which contains works that are disproportionately written by white male, Western playwrights. In this chapter Mansbridge picks up on a key point from her introduction, detailing how, early in her career, Vogel was simultaneously rejected by traditional theatres because of her noncanonical approach to playwriting and was also rejected by feminist theatre practitioners because her female characters “are presented as participants in the discourses that produce inequality” (11). Here, Mansbridge effectively presents Vogel as a champion of contradictions from the start, crafting two feminist plays that did not adhere to second-wave feminism’s desires; in these, Vogel “was seen as being very antifeminist” because they presented “very negative images of women” (Vogel, qtd. on 27). Vogel, however, was presenting intersecting identities and sites of oppression in these early plays, refusing to let her female...