Post-Pulitzer Paula Vogel learns to thrive BY BILL RODRIGUEZ

In the rehearsal hall high above the stage where Paula Vogel’s The Long Christmas Ride Home will have its world premiere this week, Angela Brazil runs through a soliloquy to be delivered in front of the apartment of her character’s estranged female lover. The speech is funny and sad and goes pretty smoothly when you consider that the actor is competing with two puppets having sex behind her.

The Long Christmas Ride Home is being pruned and shaped like theatrical topiary at Trinity Repertory Company, where it makes its debut this Friday. The play is attracting considerable interest because it is Vogel’s first in the five years since she won the Pulitzer for How I Learned To Drive. With upwards of 50 productions, Drive, which in the explanation of the playwright tells a Lolita story from the child’s point of view, was the most frequently staged American play of 1998.

Drive’s controversial subject matter was no surprise — in more than 20 prior plays, Vogel had taken on such subjects as the porn industry (Hot ’n’ Throbbing), prostitution (The Oldest Profession), and Othello from the woman’s point of view (Desdemona). Spot-on but bizarre recontexting was the rule — her most popular earlier play, 1992’s The Baltimore Waltz, dealt with the death of her brother from AIDS by conducting a fantasy tour of Europe in search of a black-market cure for something called Acquired Toilet Disease.

What was a surprise, to many, was that after her Pulitzer triumph she decided to return to Rhode Island and resume her post heading the MFA playwriting program at Brown University. This after establishing herself as a hot commodity in the theater world and jetting about for lectures, panels, and workshops. Encountered on the street in Providence two years ago, just back from Russia, she said she’d given up unpacking and was living out of a suitcase, since her life now consisted of two-week stays here and there.

Not only is she now settled back in Providence, she’s also creatively joined at the hip with Trinity — the company is set to do her next play, A Civil War Christmas, and probably the one after that. And she heads the playwriting program of the new Brown University/Trinity Rep Consortium.

" Every now and then I get caffeine, like Nilo Cruz, " she says of her return to teaching. Ten years ago she was instructing Cruz in the art of playwriting; last month he was awarded his own Pulitzer for drama, for Anna in the Tropics. And getting back to teaching is only one of the benefits of coming back to Providence. " One of the great things about this production is that I can do it in my home town, which is huge for me. Not to be trying to put it together in a room in Alaska or DC or New York. "

Crucial to her risk taking with The Long Christmas Ride Home is working with a director and actors she knows and trusts. And such risks they are: stretches of narrated speech in blank verse, intended to establish a tension with colloquial language; flashforwards as well as flashbacks; and those potentially distracting puppets, to be manipulated by actors along with traditionally black-shrouded bunraku puppeteers. All in addition to the play’s very non-traditional take on Christmas. " I’m very aware that we are creating this piece for the first time in a theater company that is necessarily fueled by A Christmas Carol, which I happen to love and which I see every year. It’s a great tradition. " But she’s taking on what she calls our only national mythology. " I’m trying to cut through the treacle. Trying to cut through the trappings, which for me are a way of not looking at it. "

In The Long Christmas Ride Home, the holiday-dinner back story is the traditional dysfunctional familial horror, on steroids. On the drive home, there’s an accident and the three young siblings involved are hurtled into their futures, to the damaged love relationships they are being trained for. " Last week it came to me what the play is in Hollywood-speak, " Vogel says. " I’ve been doing pitch sessions — you know, where you have to say, ‘It’s like Godzilla meets Bambi’? It’s A Christmas Carol meets The Ice Storm [Ang Lee’s 1997 meditation on suburban infidelity]. That’s really, really what it is. "

What it also is is a challenge to stage — and a heavy responsibility for Trinity in light of the playwright’s penchant for excising text wherever she notices that meaning can be left to the actors. " This is a very hard play to crack. It’s filled with impossibilities. I don’t assume that this is going to become the bread and butter in my theatrical canon. "

But at least she has help. " I think that the best thing I can do as I age is to trust them more, " she declares of actors and directors and production designers, at Trinity and elsewhere. " And the more that I trust them, the higher the cliff I will jump off of. "

Trinity Repertory Company, 201 Washington Street in Providence, presents The Long Christmas Ride Home May 16 through June 29. Tickets are $33 to $48, with discounts for seniors, students, disabled, and patrons under 30; call (401) 351-4242.