Paula Vogel (1951-)

Although Paula Vogel did not have her Broadway debut until 2017, she has been a long-standing figure of queer theatre for many years. Born in 1951 to a Jewish father and Roman-Catholic mother, Vogel grew up in Washington D.C. She started writing plays in the 1970s and has fifteen works to her name, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning How I Learned to Drive (1997) and the critically acclaimed Indecent (2015). Vogel has also had an illustrious career as a teacher, spending two decades at Brown University leading the graduate playwriting program and then onto the Yale School of Drama as the playwriting Chair (2008-2012) and playwright-in-residence. Paula Vogel is celebrated as a key figure in queer American theatre with Indecent being her latest and greatest hit. 

Indecent tells the real story of the controversy behind Sholem Asch’s 1907 play, The God of Vengeance. Asch’s play is centred around the love between two Jewish girls, one a prostitute, the other, the daughter of the brothel pimp. When the play was produced in New York City in 1923, it featured the first kiss between two women on a Broadway stage. Initially the brainchild of fellow Jewish creative, Rebecca Taichman, Paula Vogel stepped into the role of playwright for Indecent after a commission from the Yale Repertory Theatre and Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Taichman and Vogel collaborated very closely, with Taichman as the director. The play closely explores the connection between Judaism and queerness through the experience of the Jewish lesbians as both the characters and actors in God of Vengeance. Vogel, a Jewish lesbian herself, sees Indecent as a truth-telling celebration. In 2017, Vogel talked about the emergence of her Jewish identity while working on Indecent saying, “we should be proud and proclaiming [sic] our identity as Jewish-Americans...”   In a time of continuously rising antisemitism, Indecent serves as a reminder that Judaism is a precious religion infused with beautiful art, “We’ve got to be the guardians of our culture, if we are not guardians, our culture can die as well.”