The Baltimore Waltz and Other Plays Read online

  The Baltimore Waltz and Other Plays copyright © 1996 by Paula Vogel

  “Loose Screws” copyright © 1996 by David Savran

  And Baby Makes Seven copyright © 1984, 1993 by Paula Vogel

  The Baltimore Waltz copyright © 1992 by Paula Vogel

  Desdemona: A Play About a Handkerchief copyright © 1986, 1994 by Paula Vogel

  The Oldest Profession copyright © 1980 by Paula Vogel

  Hot ‘N’ Throbbing copyright © 1993, 1995 by Paula Vogel

  The Baltimore Waltz and Other Plays is published by Theatre Communications Group, Inc.,

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  Professionals and amateurs are hereby warned that this material, being fully protected under the Copyright Laws of the United States of America and all other countries of the Berne and Universal Copyright Conventions, is subject to a royalty. All rights including, but not limited to, professional, amateur, recording, motion picture, recitation, lecturing, public reading, radio and television broadcasting, and the rights of translation into foreign languages are expressly reserved. Particular emphasis is placed on the question of readings and all uses of these plays by educational institutions, permission for which must be secured from the author’s representative: Peter Franklin, William Morris Agency, 1325 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10019, (212) 903-1550.

  This publication is made possible in part with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, a State Agency.

  TCG books are exclusively distributed to the book trade by Consortium Book Sales and Distribution, 1045 Westgate Drive, St. Paul, MN 55114.

  Vogel, Paula.

  The Baltimore waltz and other plays / Paula Vogel.

  Contents: The Baltimore waltz—The oldest profession—Desdemona, a play about a handkerchief—And baby makes seven—Hot ‘n’ throbbing.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-55936-713-4

  I. Title.

  PS3572.0294A61995

  812’.54—dc2095–45986

  CIP

  Cover art by Gustavo de Leon

  Cover design by Cynthia Krupat

  Book design by Lisa Govan

  First Edition, April 1996

  Fourth Printing, October 2005

  THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED TO ANNE STERLING —

  with gratitude for the brilliance of her days, the warmth of her nights.

  Contents

  LOOSE SCREWS: An Introduction

  Acknowledgments

  THE BALTIMORE WALTZ

  AND BABY MAKES SEVEN

  THE OLDEST PROFESSION

  DESDEMONA

  HOT ‘N’ THROBBING

  Loose Screws

  BY DAVID SAVRAN

  Shortly after I met Paula Vogel—twenty years ago in a seminar room at Cornell University—she told me a story I have never forgotten. Although I couldn’t know it at the time, it proved to be the best possible introduction to the extraordinary plays that she would go on to write. The story involves Paula, her mother Phyllis and her older brother, Carl, and takes place somewhere in the suburban sprawl between Baltimore and Washington.

  When Paula was thirteen years old, her mother, recently divorced and with a reputation for being something of a troublemaker, complained to the Board of Health about the trash collection—or lack of it—in their apartment complex. The Board investigated and, sure enough, conditions were unsanitary and the landlord was charged. As might be expected, the Vogels were promptly delivered an eviction notice, but rather than contest it, they found another apartment. The night they moved into their new lodging, however, Phyllis bundled the children into the car and drove back to their old flat. Once in the empty rooms, Phyllis pulled three screwdrivers out of her purse and instructed the two children to unscrew every screw in the apartment. She then drew an imaginary circle on the living room rug and asked them to place the screws inside the circle. Without damaging anything, they deftly unscrewed all the lights and electric sockets, unhinged all the doors, took apart all the kitchen cabinets, the refrigerator and oven. Every fixture, every appliance in the apartment, was carefully disassembled and every door, every switchplate, was neatly, almost lovingly, lined up against the wall. On the living room rug, meanwhile, grew a mountain of screws of every shape and size. Finally, when everything was dismantled, Phyllis drew a piece of paper from her purse, wrote “SCREW YOU” on it in bold letters, and artfully positioned it on top of the pile.

  This story, which could very easily be a scene in a Paula Vogel play, is in fact amazingly revealing about Paula’s strategies as a playwright. Like her unusually resourceful mother, she characteristically directs her energies toward responding to, critiquing and dismantling someone else’s work. Each of her plays (with the notable exception of The Baltimore Waltz) is an act of retaliation. It questions, resists and teases a particular dramatic text and, more important, the text’s guiding assumptions in regard to (among other things) gender, family, sexual identity, love, sex, aging and domestic violence. Going quite literally behind the scenes, Desdemona suggests that Shakespeare’s women are not quite the innocent victims of masculine desires they appear to be but active makers—and unmakers—of each others’ destinies. Talking back to Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, And Baby Makes Seven celebrates fantasy and the power of narrative—and gives a new meaning to “family values.” Responding to both the structure and the quaintly elderly protagonists of David Mamet’s The Duck Variations, The Oldest Profession reimagines old age as a time of sensual delight. Taking on the plays of John Patrick Shanley and Sam Shepard with a vengeance, Hot ’N’ Throbbing demonstrates that behind their poor, misunderstood male protagonists lies a romanticization of violence against women that proves both dangerous and irresponsible. And although The Baltimore Waltz is a commemoration of Paula’s brother, Carl, it also is a masterful reworking of Ambrose Bierce’s “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” in which all of the action takes place in the mind of a soldier during the moment in which he is being hanged. Analogously, all of Anna’s memories and fantasies can be understood to transpire in that split second after the doctor tells her that her brother has died.

  Paula’s method of critiquing, or if one prefers, deconstructing the work of her forebears comes from her reading of the theories of Bertolt Brecht and, even more significantly, of Viktor Shklovsky, the Russian Formalist from whom Brecht purloined the Alienation Effect. Shklovsky recognized that over time our perceptions become increasingly habitual and automatic: We no longer see what is around us. The purpose of art, according to Shklovsky, is to restore visibility, to defamiliarize the commonplace so that we notice it again. In adapting Shklovsky, Brecht added a political dimension to this notion of defamiliarization: Brecht’s theatre attempted to demonstrate that that which we take for granted and assume to be universal and eternal is, in fact, the product of human labor and history—and thus subject to change. Like Brecht’s, Paula’s theatre is one in which the commonplace is insistently made strange, in which five grandmotherly women sitting on a park bench turn out to be prostitutes, or three obstreperous little boys turn out to be the imaginary children three adults manipulate to work out an ingenious and extravagant ménage à trois. The effect of this defamiliarization is to allow spectators and readers to see these characters and their situations in a new light, to reevaluate the meaning of women’s work outside the home, or to cele
brate the elements of fantasy that necessarily structure all relationships.

  Like Brecht, Paula writes from a deeply rooted political sense. Unlike her illustrious predecessor, however, Paula is an avowed feminist. All of her work is devoted to exposing not just how women are entrapped and oppressed, but the possibilities that figures like Desdemona or the oldest professionals have to contest, subvert and redefine the roles they have been assigned. Yet Paula’s feminism is itself a complex phenomenon. As these plays suggest, she reacted strongly against the first wave of feminist theatre that surfaced during the 1970s, the “let’s-celebrate-ourselves-as-women” brand of feminism that Paula regards not just as simplistic and ahistorical but also as exclusionary because certain kinds of women (depending on their class or racial or occupational position) inevitably get left out of the celebration. She has carved out her own distinctive feminist theatre in these five plays by recognizing, in her own words, that feminism means being politically incorrect. It means avoiding the easy answer—that isn’t really an answer at all—in favor of posing the question in the right way. It means refusing to construct an exemplary feminist hero. It means writing speculative rather than polemical plays. It means turning Desdemona into a whore for real, or constructing two lesbians who use imaginary boy children as the conduits for their desires, or showing a woman titillated not just by writing pornography but by using her own children as the bases for her sexual fantasies.

  Paula’s complex relationship to feminism, as well as to Brecht, is in part the result of the very real contradictions that molded her when she was growing up. The daughter of a Jewish father from New York and a Catholic mother from New Orleans (her father left home when she was eleven), Paula has always been just a little bit schizoid. Passionately identifying with Mary Martin as Peter Pan, she confesses that she was always, well, confused about sexual identities—she expected that she, too, could get the girl. A lesbian who, by her own accord, loves men (and John Waters movies), she came out when she was seventeen. Brought up in a working-class family (her mother would move the household about once a year), she nevertheless entered academia, graduating from Catholic University and spending three years in the doctoral program in theatre at Cornell. A devotee of Büchner and Sigmund Romberg, Maria Irene Fornes and Judy Garland, In the Summer House and The Bad Seed, she is a fierce defender of the theatre in an era when it is under fire, seemingly, from all quarters. Since 1985, she has been director of the Graduate Playwriting Program at Brown University and has fashioned it into one of the very best in the country. Modeling herself in equal parts Joseph Papp and Max Bialystock (Zero Mostel in The Producers), she has transformed the annual New Plays Festival at Brown into one of the most exciting showcases for new work in the country (although I still look forward to the realization of a project she and I have long fantasized, the Dinner Theatre of Cruelty). A brilliant mentor, she inspires students and gives the most penetrating—and supportive—critiques I have ever seen. As in her own work, Paula is intent on getting her students to write not about what they are sure of, but what they don’t know, what terrifies them, what they desire madly, what they have to fight to comprehend. As she explains it, she longs, both in her own writing and that of her students, to unleash the confusion in the hope that this will lead both writer and reader to understand the confusion, to make sense out of a world—and a society—gone terribly awry.

  The reader turning to Paula’s plays expecting that they will provide a straightforward narrative of her life will be disappointed. Although all are rooted in her experiences and all, in effect, tell her own story, none, not even The Baltimore Waltz, does so directly. And while she is the first to admit that her writing is deeply autobiographical, she has reacted strongly against the intensely personalized actor training methods she observed in graduate school. She writes by focusing not on autobiographical content but on questions of dramatic form, trusting that the content will take care of itself. She is obsessed with various theatrical devices and all of her plays use a formal device as their starting point, be it the “five blackbirds” principle of The Oldest Profession or the jump cuts of Desdemona. The device she uses most commonly is circular form, which she understands as an attempt to defamiliarize what Brecht calls Aristotelian drama, drama organized by the law of cause and effect and dependent upon a spectator’s strong empathic response to a protagonist. The Baltimore Waltz, And Baby Makes Seven and Hot ’N’ Throbbing are all circular in their organization. They are all about a repetition of the beginning, a return to the scene of the crime, as it were, that signals that everything has remained the same and, simultaneously, changed radically. All three texts play out and inhabit that contradiction. Paula’s defamiliarization of Aristotelian drama also requires a strict limitation on empathy. And while all of her characters inspire a certain amount of identification, Paula is more concerned that the spectator come to recognize and deal with the necessarily problematic position of each protagonist. As a result, these five plays do not make easy reading—or playing. They demand that readers, actors and directors approach them with a genuine commitment to exploring their desires and fears as well as the laws, both spoken and unspoken, of the society in which they live (in the understanding that it is the law that produces desire and fear in the first place).

  Of the five plays in the collection, the most unequivocally comic one, And Baby Makes Seven, is also the one with the most ill-fated production history (Paula refers to it as her “Scottish play”). For me, however, it remains a source of pure delight. In production, the three imaginary children always steal the show—as they were designed to do. (Paula carefully avoids providing much information about their three adult keepers.) And although the play’s focus is clearly on the relationship between the adults and the children, and, specifically, on how the adults use the children to say and do what they are unable to do, Baby is really a play about narrative, about the stories that people make up to construct their identities, to deal with the people they love, and to divert themselves. Anna and Ruth are playwrights of sorts (to that extent, they both stand in for Paula), expert plotters who use their imaginary children to negotiate their relationship with each other and with Peter, and to deal with the impending arrival of a real child. Despite the play’s psychological acumen and its formal brilliance (its three extraordinary death scenes leading up to the birth), however, Baby is perhaps the most original and important for its redefinition of family. For me, the play’s rather eccentric nuclear family functions as a utopian fantasy, an ideal community in which even the wildest desires can be satisfied, in which personal histories can be invented on the spot, and in which adults are free to play like children. And although the first draft of the play was written in 1982, it uncannily anticipates the new “queer politics” of the 1990s because of the ways in which it destabilizes sexual identities. For although the three adults clearly self-identify as lesbian or gay, both the nature of their ménage and the content of their fantasies (at least as enacted by the imaginary children) question those designations. What is one to make of a family in which the boundaries between illusion and reality, power and subjection, friendship and love, female and male, are so porous, and in which family members freely materialize and dematerialize.

  Like the other plays in this collection, Baby is more concerned with asking these questions than answering them. Like The Baltimore Waltz, it is a celebration of narrative, of the power of the theatre to make fantasy real. It commemorates the childhood one never had, the friends wished for but never gained, the desires never acknowledged. In their very different ways, all of these plays are acts of commemoration, both exhuming and reimagining the past—Paula’s past for sure, but also that of the culture of which she is a part. Thus, The Oldest Profession looks back to a time when there was a palpable connection between people and both the work they performed and the things they consumed. And Hot ’N’ Throbbing rereads the stories that constitute the canon of great literature and exposes what has been omitted in the telling. Ye
t these plays look back without nostalgia. They represent less an idealization of the past than a return to the scene of the crime. Like Phyllis taking Paula and Carl back to their vacant apartment, they are intent upon revisiting the past in order to take it apart, to analyze it, to undermine it, and so to wreak a truly creative revenge. In this volume, Paula leaves us not just a pile of loose screws (although there are plenty of those jangling about), but the pieces of the rooms in which we live, the closet doors, the marriage beds, the sources of light—and darkness—in the hope that we will discover how to put them to better use.

  June 1995

  David Savran has published widely on post-World War II American theatre. His most recent book is Communists, Cowboys, and Queers: The Politics of Masculinity in the Work of Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992). He is a professor of English at Brown University.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  First and foremost, thanks are due to my late brother, Carl Vogel. My heart has given him all its glittering prizes.

  And to family members—my mother, Phyllis Vogel, who gamely reads each new play; and my brother Mark. The entire Marks and Manos family who keep the Maryland home fires burning.

  Thanks as well belong to my agent, Peter Franklin for shielding me from the slings and arrows and sharing the champagne. The following artists have generously given me their artistry and opened their artistic and personal homes: Molly Smith and the casts and companies of Perseverance Theatre; Tanya Berezin, Anne Bogart, Cherry Jones and the casts and companies of Circle Repertory Theatre; the company of Bay Street Theatre; Robert Brustein and the cast and company of American Repertory Theatre and Andrew Manley and the Harrogate Theatre. Gratitude to constant advisors, supporters and friends who, over the past decade, have read first drafts of my plays and the letters to critics and foes they convinced me never to send: Joanne Zippel, Ellen Schwartz, Stephen Ciesluk, Tish Dace and Stephen Weeks. I am fortunate to have the dramaturgy and the friendship of Ronn Smith and David Savran.