"Now that my mother is dead, I can finally say that it is an autobiographical work."

BarcelonaAmerican playwright Paula Vogel (Providence, Rhode Island, 1951) arrived at the Sala Beckett this Tuesday with pizza for everyone. "Artists need to eat. For a long time, I was a starving playwright and lived below the poverty line. To create well, you need a full stomach," Vogel states. An established author deeply committed to exposing the cracks in society, the artist is visiting Barcelona for the premiere of one of her most poignant and celebrated works. How I learned to driveIn the Catalan version, the show is directed by Marilia Samper and stars Ivan Benet and Mireia Aixalà. It will run from January 28th to March 1st.

Since I had read Lolita Inspired by Nabokov in his youth, Vogel was haunted by the idea of ​​writing a play from the perspective of a child being abused by an adult. In the show, the protagonist is a teenager nicknamed Coseta by her family, whom her uncle manipulates for sexual gain. "I knew the context for the story had to be driving lessons, because we all go through them during adolescence, a stage of sexual maturation. On the one hand, we're learning very clear rules of conduct, and on the other, things can be very confusing and the rules are constantly being broken." The show, which premiered in 1997 starring Mary-Louise Parker and David Morse, won the Pulitzer Prize and was one of those unexpected successes that cement an artist's reputation. "I wrote it in two weeks, thinking no one would want to produce it." Before the premiere, I was convinced that people would throw stones at me, especially because of how I portray the pedophile. I wanted to show his complexity,” says Vogel. In 2022, it was revived at the Manhattan Theatre Club in New York, as part of the Broadway circuit, and earned her a Tony Award nomination.

An autofiction playwright

With this new version, Vogel also changed how she presented the play. "When I wrote it, I promised I would protect my family members. But now that my mother is dead, I can say it's an autobiographical work. I left home very young because of my sexuality, and when I told that man I never wanted to see him again, he drowned himself in alcohol," the playwright recounts. In fact, this isn't the first time she's written about lived experiences. Baltimore vouchers (1992) – of which a dramatized reading will take place at the Beckett on January 31 – explored the loss of his brother due to AIDS and with Indecent (2017) addressed, among other issues, homophobia.

"I wasn't prepared for the impact it had How I learned to driveDespite being 45 years old, I gave dozens of interviews during the first premiere, in which journalists tried to get me to admit it was autobiographical. It's an unfair question. They don't ask it when it comes to works by Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Sergi Belbel, or Josep Maria Miró. Great writers talk about their lives, but men are allowed to do so without question,” reflects the playwright, who celebrates the shift in social perspective on abuse—"Now it's talked about, it's no longer a secret," she says—but at the same time warns of a dark present full of setbacks. “In the US, we're going through a period of going back to a period of going back to a period of everything happening again. My plays are being banned,” she laments.

Faced with this situation, and at 74 years old and still going strong, Vogel is very clear about what she wants to do with the rest of her life. “What do I have left, 10 years, more or less? I want to open a writing center in Wellfleet, Massachusetts.” "It's the town where I live, a beautiful and progressive place," explains the playwright. "I'd like it to be a meeting place for writers, especially young ones, so they can connect and create from the heart. We're looking for funding, but if we get it, it will give me a very happy last ten years."