Through the Eyes of Lolita

Arthur Holmberg: Your plays frequently deal with taboos. If I had to explain your theatrical signature to someone unfamiliar with your work, I would say that you trespass into forbidden territory with a smile on your face. You disturb the bones of forbidden topics, then make the audience laugh. What is the function of humor in your vision?

Paula Vogel: I actually describe [How I Learened to] Drive as a comedy. Of course it’s not, but the first half very much functions as comedy. At some elemental level, it is who I am. My family had the most inappropriate moments of humor at funerals. Maybe it’s a survival strategy. Some people say that this comes from Jewish genes. At the beginning of the Baltimore Waltz [a play about her brother’s death from AIDS] I used a real letter my brother wrote me with instructions for his funeral that included directions on how to lay him out in the coffin in drag. For me combining sadness and comedy heightens both. The collision of tones makes both more extreme. One of my favorite movies is Roman Polanski’s The Fearless Vampire Killers. I’ve seen it sixteen times, and the reason I watch it so often is the combination of terror and comedy. You’re scared to the point of screaming, then he cracks a joke. It doesn’t defuse the terror, it defuses the guarding against the terror. We don’t want to be taken by surprise, so we keep our guard up. Comedy defuses that vigilance so in the next moment we are unprepared for the explosion. I’ll give you an example. There is a little Jewish hotel keeper who lusts after voluptuous young women in the village, but his wife keeps him on a tight leash. One night he stays out too late, and vampires kill him. In the grave he is finally beyond his wife’s reach. So he comes back that night to get a buxom virgin. She screams and screams, and it’s a horrifying moment. He starts to attack, she reaches for a cross, and he says, “Boy, have you got the wrong vampire,” then lunges for the kill. The comedy dismantles any protective covering. Hitchcock uses comedy and terror the same way. So that’s why I think I do it.

AH: Humor is also a form of seduction. In one of the play’s funniest speeches, “A Mother’s Guide to Social Drinking,” an older woman tells a young girl how not to get drunk. She advises her never to touch a drink with a sexual position in the name like Dead Man Screw or The Missionary and to learn to drink like a man: straight up. The speech makes the audience laugh, but then you hit hard with an emotionally devastating scene.

PV: Li’l Bit’s drunk and can’t defend herself.

AH: A double seduction, Li’l Bit and the audience.

PV: Comedy is complicity. If you make an audience laugh . . .

AH: They are your friends.

PV: Not only your friends, but also in alliance with the play world. They’re on the side of the play now because they laughed.

AH: Many of your plays deal with families. European critics often say American drama does not achieve greatness because our playwrights, obsessed by petty family melodramas, never look through the living room window to see the larger world and the problems outside.

PV: Rubbish. The Greeks dealt with the family. Aristotle describes domestic violence among kings as tragedy. British critics often throw that complaint at me, but Pinter and David Hare also deal with families. It’s important that the family be put in its social context, that there is a world beyond. The family remains the structure at the heart of most drama because the family, after all, reflects its community’s values and the politics of their time.

AH: King Lear and The Oresteia are family dramas.

PV: So is Hamlet and Mother Courage. The great American playwrights, like the great European playwrights, like the great global playwrights, deal with the family as a unit within a greater body politic.

AH: So how do you see Drive as political?

PV: A lot of people are trying to turn this into a drama about an individual family. To me it is not. It is a way of looking on a microcosmic level at how this culture sexualizes children. How we are taught at an extremely early age to look at female bodies. One of the tag lines I had in my head when I was writing this play was, it takes a whole village to molest a child. Jon Benet Ramsey was not a fluke. When we Americans saw the video tape of her at the beauty contest when she was five, a chill went up our collective spines. At what age are we sexualizing our children in a consumer culture to sell blue jeans and underwear? So children’s bodies are sexualized all the way down from Madison Avenue to the wealthy suburb of Denver where the Ramseys lived. I would call that political and not specifically the psychopathology of an individual family. I would say that’s cultural. And now we are starting to see a sexualized gaze toward young boys. Leonardo DiCaprio enjoys cult status because he looks prepubescent. Wherever there is confusion or double, triple, and quadruple standards, that is the realm of theatre. Drama lives in paradoxes and contradictions. If you look at the structure of my play, all I’m doing is asking how do you feel about this? We see a girl of seventeen and an older man in a car seat. You think you know how you feel about this relationship? Alright, fine. Now, let’s go back a year earlier. Do you still think you know what you feel about this situation? Great. Now let’s change the situation a little bit more. He’s married to her aunt. How do you feel about that? The play allows me this kind of slippage because we have these contradictory feelings about the sexuality of boys and girls. So I tease out those contradictions. The play is a reverse syllogism. It constantly pulls the rug out from under our emotional responses by going back earlier and earlier in time. The play moves in reverse.

AH: Earlier you said we are starting to see a sexual gaze turned towards young boys. Drive eroticizes the male. American playwrights have generally shied away from the eroticized male, even overtly homosexual playwrights like Tennessee Williams or William Inge. In Williams and Inge the sexualized male is dangerous or dysfunctional. So even gay playwrights are terrified of eroticized men.

PV: I’m not. Here I am the “out” lesbian, but my pronounced subject position as a lesbian does not mean that I do not love the male of the species. In my plays, I want to present women as desiring subjects, which means that men sometimes become the object of the female gaze. But this also goes back to Baltimore Waltz, in which I wanted to pay homage to my brother’s desire for men. In order to do that I used a woman subject desiring the male body. I wanted the audience to appreciate how beautiful the male body is. Some women automatically do that, so I used a woman, and through a female subject, straight men who are homophobic would go, yeah, I can see how she finds him beautiful. And if I’ve got them there, I’ve got the entire audience understanding that the male body can be a desired object. And then I am halfway there in terms of overcoming our homophobia towards men on stage. The two male actors in Baltimore Waltz were so beautiful – Richard Thompson and Joe Mantello. They took my breath away. How could you not want to touch that? How could you judge anyone for desiring those men? It was initially something that I worked with to embrace my brother’s gaze as a gay man.

AH: Drive eroticizes the female as well as the male, but in different ways. Whereas you eroticize the male verbally in “Recipe for a Southern Boy,” you eroticize the female visually.

PV: Yes, Li’l Bit’s is eroticized through the photo shoots, through the visual presentation of the body. When I was doing research for Hot ‘n’ Throbbing [a play about female pornography that premiered at the A.R.T.], I discovered that women tend to eroticize through words and narration as much or more than through the eyes. So for me “Recipe for a Southern Boy” was the way to really present the desiring female subject and the desired male object.

AH: Drive dramatizes in a disturbing way how we receive great harm from the people who love us.

PV: I would reverse that. I would say that we can receive great love from the people who harm us.

AH: Why is it significant to reverse it?

PV: We are now living in a culture of victimization, and great harm can be inflicted by well-intentioned therapists, social workers, and talk show hosts who encourage people to dwell in their identity as victim. Without denying or forgetting the original pain, I wanted to write about the great gifts that can also be inside that box of abuse. My play dramatizes the gifts we receive from the people who hurt us.

AH: So what does Li’l Bit receive?

PV: She received the gift of how to survive.

AH: From her Uncle?

PV: Absolutely. I am going to teach you to drive like a man, he says. He becomes her mentor and shows her a way of thinking ahead ten steps down the road before anyone else to figure out what the other guy is going to do before he does it. That not only enables her to survive but actually enables her, I think, to reject him and destroy him.

AH: And she does destroy him.

PV: He gives her the gifts to do that. He gives her the training. He gives her the ego formation. You, he says, you’ve got a fire in the head. He gives her gifts in just about every scene. He teaches her the importance of herself as an individual and the ability to strategize to protect that. It’s all there in the driving lessons. It’s abuse simultaneously with a kind of affirmation and reassurance.

AH: In Drive, Li’l Bit looks at her painful memories, processes the experiences, and then moves on. Why is it important to forgive the harm?

PV: Many people stay rooted in anger against transgressions that occurred in childhood, and this rage will be directed to other people in their adult lives and toward themselves. Whether we call it forgiveness or understanding, there comes a moment when the past has to be processed, and we have to find some control. There are two forgivenesses in the play. One forgiveness for Peck, but the most crucial forgiveness would be Li’l Bit’s forgiving Li’l Bit. Li’l Bit as an adult looking at and understanding her complicity . . .

AH: her destructiveness. You once said that it was important to give the audience a catharsis.

PV: Catharsis purges the pity and the terror and enables the audience to transcend them. So you have her memories of the final confrontation with Peck in the hotel room and afterwards the flashback to the first driving lesson. And then the last scene, which brings us up to the present. This is a movement forward. For me, purgation means a forward movement.

AH: In Drive, as in many of your plays, music is a crucial element.

PV: Music contains a subliminal message that I will never be able to accomplish with words because words always involve the cognitive. Music speaks directly to the emotions. So for me as a playwright, music is an important ally. It is also important as a way of saying this was gender in 1960.

AH: Gender? You gender music?

PV: Yes. It has messages about being a man and being a woman. When you listen to the Beach Boys what comes back is a code of the 1960s. Just like disco music brings back the entire culture of the seventies. So I used music to get to the culture of the 60s. Music is a time capsule.

AH: You’re a feminist, but some critics have called your plays misogynistic.

PV: In the 70s a lot of people at the Women’s Project [an important theatre company in N.Y.] thought I was misogynistic. And Julia Miles always commented that my work was so negative about women, that it was so dark and distressing. For me being a feminist does not mean showing a positive image of women. For me being a feminist means looking at things that disturb me, looking at things that hurt me as a woman. We live in a misogynist world, and I want to see why. And I want to look and see why not just men are the enemy but how I as a woman participate in the system. To say that men are the enemy is patronizing. It makes me a victim, and I am not comfortable as a victim. It’s a mistake to attribute goodness, pure abstract goodness, to either sex. I don’t recognize that, so maybe I’m not extremely feminist. To me a play doesn’t need to make me feel good. It can be a view of the world that is so upsetting that when I leave the theatre, I want to say no to that play, I will not allow that to happen in my life.

AH: Desdemona [a play in which Vogel explores the secret lives of the women in Shakespeare’s tragedy] may not have positive female role models, but it most certainly is a feminist play.

PV: Desdemona shows how women participate in a social system that does not allow them to bond. We bond with our husbands and our class structure rather than with each other. I don’t know how you can get more feminist than that. Does it make me feel good? No. Does it worry me? Yes. Does it call on me to act? Absolutely. At the moment, we women are colluding with the patriarchal system and with the class structure. You can’t deport the enemy, the enemy is inside us. The really dangerous enemy is that we have internalized misogyny and homophobia. There were a lot of headlines, “Lesbian wins Pulitzer, blah, blah, blah…” I am the first person to say, hey wait, I’m not here to make every else one feel homophobic, I’m homophobic. I was brought up in this country. I was taught to hate gays. I was taught to hate women. What we are taught to hate unifies us as a society. Our communal bond is that we are all racist, not just whites. Blacks are racist, Latinos are racist. We’re taught racism the way we’re taught homophobia and misogyny. It’s all internalized. So it’s not clear-cut to me, here is the good guy and here is the bad guy. I understand Strindberg. Strindberg is an extremely powerful ally for me as a woman dramatist because in his plays there is a fear and a power of woman not approached by any other dramatist. In grad school, I steeped myself in Strindberg. He is a remarkable dramatist. But in the sixties and seventies, feminist theatre did not produce plays of negative empathy. Like Hollywood, they only wanted positive role models – feel-good role models. There is nothing wrong with that. It is necessary, and I am finally about to write my first play with a positive role model. It takes place on the last Christmas Eve of the Civil War in Washington DC. The kids in my family – my nephews and godchildren – keep asking, “When can we see one of your plays,” and I go, “Oh, maybe in another ten years when you’re old enough.” So now I’m writing a Christmas play with positive role models for the kids.

Arthur Holmberg is the Literary Director of the A.R.T.