WELLFLEET – Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Paula Vogel is just like every other Cape Codder. She feels a calm when she drives over the Sagamore Bridge. She keeps the location of her favorite ponds a secret. And she likes everything about the off-season.
Vogel’s play “Indecent,” about a Yiddish theater troupe performing a play on Broadway in the 1920s, is a nominee for three 2017 Tony Awards tonight including Best Play. [UPDATE: “Indecent” won 2017 Tony Awards for Best Lighting Design of a Play and Best Direction of a Play.]
Cape Cod: “It has been since 1992 the place that I write. Like any playwright, I know where all of my heroes have lived.” — Paula Vogel, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright
Vogel recalls first coming to the Cape in 1984 when she was teaching playwriting at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. “I had always wanted to go,” the Washington DC native said of visiting Cape Cod.
Paula Vogel, a Pulitzer Play-winner writer who lives in Wellfleet on Cape Cod, is the author of the Broadway play, “Indecent.”
She started visiting the Cape more often, and when she began receiving royalties from her play “The Baltimore Waltz,” which won the Obie Award for Best Play in 1992, she purchased a condominium in Truro.
With proceeds from her 1997 Pulitzer Prize-winning play “How I Learned To Drive,” she bought a house in Truro.
By that time, she was splitting her time between Truro and Providence.
When Vogel’s mother-in-law died, she and her wife, Anne Fausto-Sterling, a Brown University professor and author, moved to her mother-in-law’s house in Wellfleet, where they currently live.
“I’ve been living on Cape Cod sort of off and on since 1992,” she said.
When asked what she likes best about Cape Cod, she has a quick answer. “I think it’s physically beautiful. I actually love just the smell of the air.”
She said she also loves “the lightness, the way the sun reflects on the water.”
She also said she loves the wildlife. “I love being able to hear coyotes at night when there aren’t a lot of summer folks around.”
And then she summed it up. “What is not to love?” she said.
Vogel joins an elite list of Pulitzer Prize-winning playwrights who have written important works on the Cape, including Eugene O’Neill and Tennessee Williams.
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