September 5 - 25, 2005

application deadline: May 27, 2005

PAULA VOGEL, playwright

Paula Vogel's play, How I Learned To Drive received the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, in addition to the Lortel, Drama Desk, Outer Critics Circle and New York Drama Critics Awards for Best Play. It won Vogel her second Obie, and it has been produced all over the world, including South Africa, England, Australia, Greece, Germany, Slovenia, Canada, Italy, Turkey, Mexico, Croatia, Brazil and Spain. Her new play, THE LONG CHRISTMAS RIDE HOME, was produced at the Vineyard Theatre in New York this past fall with the distinguished puppeteer Basil Twist, and the director, Mark Brokaw. The play, in a separate production, subsequently ran at Long Wharf in 2004. Vogel's other plays include The Mineola Twins, The Baltimore Waltz, Hot 'n' Throbbing, Desdemona, And Baby Makes Seven and The Oldest Profession. Theatre Communications Group has published two anthologies of her work, The Mammary Plays and The Baltimore Waltz and Other Plays. The Long Christmas Ride Home will be published by TCG in Fall 2004. Vogel won the American Academy of Arts Prize in Literature in 2004; an Obie for Best Play in 1992, the Rhode Island Pell Award in the Arts, the Hull-Warriner Award, The Laura Pell Award, the Pew Charitable Trust Senior Award, a Guggenheim, an AT&T New Plays Award, the Fund for New American Plays, the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Center Fellowship, several National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, the McKnight Fellowship, the Bunting Fellowship, and the Governor's Award for the Arts. She has taught at Brown University and directed the MFA Playwriting Program since 1984, and is currently the Adele Kellenberg Seaver Professor of Creative Writing at Brown. Vogel has conducted theatrical bootcamps with playwrights in Brazil, Prague, London, Los Angeles and for women in maximum security at the Adult Corrections Institute in Rhode Island and for critics, staff members and interns at Arena Stage in Washington DC.

Residency Statement

I propose to conduct a playwriting bootcamp with eight writers who have had prior production experience and several plays under their belts. We will meet twice a week for discussion, and I will assign short, theatrical explorations based on our collective discussions; we will read aloud these short plays to each other. The bootcamp will play with theatrical forms, plot structures, language strategies, approaches to character, and the visual life of the stage and the playworld (plasticity). We will conclude with a 48 hour bake-off: a play designed collectively by the group and read aloud in a marathon session. Humor, openness to a broad range of aesthetics, and curiosity are musts.

Application Requirements

Applicants should submit the first ten pages each from two plays (total of twenty pages). I would like a resume and a letter telling me 1) their reasons for attending the residency, 2) a short and pithy theatrical manifesto in a paragraph, 3) their past workshop writing experiences, and I would love to know 4) their favorite works of theatre and film.