The Theatre of Paula Vogel: Practice, Pedagogy, and Influences by Lee Brewer Jones (review)

Reviewed by: The Theatre of Paula Vogel: Practice, Pedagogy, and Influences by Lee Brewer Jones Bess Rowen (She/Her) The Theatre of Paula Vogel: Practice, Pedagogy, and Influences. Lee Brewer Jones. Methuen Critical Companions Series. New York: Methuen Drama, 2023; pp. 206. When the rain fell on Manke and Rivkele's kiss in Indecent (2017), the play not only restored and reperformed the lesbian kiss from Sholem Asch's God of Vengeance (1907) that never quite made it to Broadway, but it also reminded audiences of the continued relevance of Paula Vogel's writing. Indecent was Vogel's long-awaited Broadway debut, and it played mere blocks away from Sweat, a Broadway debut from her former student, Lynn Nottage. This moment marked a kind of mainstream commercial exposure for Vogel—as both a playwright and mentor—that she had not experienced thus far in her career, despite winning a Pulitzer in 1998 for How I Learned to Drive. The first book-length study of Vogel's work was Joanna Mansbridge's Paula Vogel, published by University of Michigan Press in 2014, meaning that this analysis stops short of some crucial milestones from the most recent decade of Vogel's impressive career. Luckily, Lee Brewer Jones's The Theatre of Paula Vogel: Practice, Pedagogy, and Influences is here, as its title promises, to extend the throughline of Vogel's theatrical accomplishments in the arenas of playwriting and teaching. The volume includes a great deal of detail about Vogel's early influences, a thorough recounting of her theatrical work until this point, and a laudable focus on her pedagogy and legacy as a teacher. However, Jones often gets so interested in the many important facets of Vogel's career that the book's first few chapters seem overladen with details at the expense of clarity. The Theatre of Paula Vogel contains a preface, five chapters, and then a "Critical Perspectives" section that invites other voices into the conversation. Jones's brief preface primes the reader with a discussion of the critiques and [End Page 107] censorship surrounding Asch's God of Vengeance that would ultimately serve as the inspiration for Indecent. This frames Vogel's career nicely, as it highlights how the "Little Jewish Play" served as a springboard in her life and career. Chapter 1 turns back to Vogel's origins, from her birth through her early playwriting influences. Here, Jones introduces the concept of "a Jewish gene" that Vogel once noted as an inspiration for her play topics (1), a term Jones returns to throughout the volume. Jewish themes are important to Vogel's work, but the repetition of this phrase is rather jarring and seems overessentialist. He also provides some background on three playwrights whom Vogel has called her "gods" (5): John Guare, María Irene Fornés, and Caryl Churchill. Although this information is useful, Jones homes in on two small phrases from various interviews with Vogel and others in this chapter to make rather sweeping assumptions about the interviewees. Jones takes a quote from a David Savran interview to imply that Fornés "never acquired native fluency" (9) in English—an incorrect and odd conclusion to draw about someone who worked as a translator. Chapter 2, "Developing a Unique Voice," delves into the content of Vogel's plays by focusing on her uses of defamiliarization, which "[makes] the familiar strange," and negative empathy, which "forces us to develop empathy for people we would ordinarily expect to despise" (17). Jones considers these concepts in the lesser-discussed early plays Desdemona (1993), The Oldest Profession (1988), and And Baby Makes Seven (1984). The following chapter, "Building an International Reputation," provides useful cultural context about the AIDS epidemic and the NEA Four to better appreciate The Baltimore Waltz (1992) and Hot 'N' Throbbing (1994). The critical discussion of these plays is detailed, but the organization of these two chapters does not support either a clear chronological or thematic relationship, instead progressing in ways that distract from the analyses. A distinct shift occurs at chapter 4, "The House of Paula Vogel," where Jones clears his text of excessive quotations and finally lets his prose tell an appropriately poetic tale of a...