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< In honor of Mother's Day, here's 'Mother Play' — which gestated for 40 years

May 12, 20245:01 AM ET

In honor of Mother's Day, here's 'Mother Play' — which gestated for 40 years

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AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:

On this Mother's Day, we have a piece reminding us that some of us are lucky enough to have more than one nurturing mother figure in our lives. Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Paula Vogel's semi-autobiographical new work, "Mother Play," starring Jessica Lange, has opened on Broadway, and it's up for multiple Tony Awards. Reporter Jeff Lunden says Vogel herself is not a mother, but as a teacher, she nurtured and mentored generations of playwrights, many now famous.

JEFF LUNDEN, BYLINE: To most of the public, Paula Vogel is best known for her moving, highly theatrical plays, among them, "How I Learned To Drive" and "Indecent." But since 1984, she has taught scores of younger playwrights, first at Brown University, then at Yale.

PAULA VOGEL: I love teaching as much as I love writing. So this has actually, for the last 40 years, been something of a juggling act because I always missed doing the other one.

LUNDEN: And over the years, her former students have won major theater awards and been produced on and off Broadway.

VOGEL: I wanted my students to get on Broadway before I did. I wanted my students to get produced at theater companies that I would never be produced in. You know, I always think of this as kind of one-stop shopping. Come in as an emerging playwright and leave the room as my colleague.

QUIARA ALEGRIA HUDES: One of the first things she said the first day I met her was when a door opens for you, you hold it open, and you let one other person through.

LUNDEN: Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Quiara Alegria Hudes spent three years at Brown University studying with Paula Vogel.

HUDES: And that's her, except for she's really holding the door open and, like, hundreds of people are coming through, you know? She teaches you about the ethics, not just playwriting structure and style but the ethics of living a life as a writer, as an artist. She models that, you know?

LUNDEN: Vogel frequently writes out of personal experience, sometimes painful personal experience. MacArthur Grant-winning playwright Sarah Ruhl says she studied with Vogel at a particularly vulnerable time in her life.

SARAH RUHL: I met Paula when I was 20, and my father had just died of cancer, and I was back at Brown. And Paula really understood how grief shapes an artist and also how to help artists out of that muddle and into their work.

LUNDEN: When two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Lynn Nottage first met Paula Vogel, she was planning to go to journalism school and didn't realize that playwriting was a career path for women.

LYNN NOTTAGE: I was taking a playwriting seminar class, and she walked in. And she was still a young, ambitious playwright figuring out how to teach playwriting, and I found her to be warm and generous and nurturing and encouraging and really inspirational in ways that fed my spirit.

LUNDEN: And they're still friends. Nottage says when she and Vogel made their Broadway debuts in 2017, they frequently met for drinks because they felt they weren't getting the support from the media and the Broadway community that they had hoped for.

NOTTAGE: So I think that having an ally and having a sister and having someone literally I could hold hands with and, you know, fight the powers that be really emboldened me and allowed me to survive that.

LUNDEN: Paula Vogel's commitment beyond the classroom is one of the things her former students love about her.

VOGEL: I've actually officiated at a number of former students' weddings, which has become one of my hobbies. I love doing it.

LUNDEN: And they read early versions of each other's plays, says Quiara Alegria Hudes.

HUDES: We do share drafts. I have read "Mother Play," and I think it's her best play. And I don't say that lightly. I am in awe of her body of work.

LUNDEN: Here's the thing - Paula Vogel may have become a nurturing teacher and colleague, but as "Mother Play" makes clear, her own mother wasn't particularly nurturing. Jessica Lange plays the fictional version.

JESSICA LANGE: In the play, Phyllis makes some absolutely unforgivable decisions and then really pays the price for it, lives with those consequences for the rest of her life.

LUNDEN: Vogel says she wrote the play in homage to mother plays written by men.

VOGEL: When I was sitting at the dinner table with my mother, my brother and I could quote "Glass Menagerie" at each other, have a little private joke and get through dinnertime. But I was curious as to, what is the difference when women write mother plays?

LUNDEN: And her mother play is written with empathy and forgiveness. The audience sees this single mother struggling over the course of 40 years, with money, with her gay children, with alcoholism.

(SOUNDBITE OF PLAY, "MOTHER PLAY")

LANGE: (As Phyllis) Martha, dear - not as much vermouth.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: (As Martha) Martini number two.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

NOTTAGE: Maybe Paula exists in sort of resistance and rebellion to her mother.

LUNDEN: Again, Lynn Nottage.

NOTTAGE: You think about the path that Paula has taken is that she never had biological children of her own, but she has this immense, beautiful family in the theater world, and that's really a blessing.

LUNDEN: For NPR News, I'm Jeff Lunden in New York.

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