It's 1962, just outside of D.C., and matriarch Phyllis is supervising her teenage children, Carl and Martha, as they move into a new apartment. Phyllis has strong ideas about what her children need to do and be to succeed, and woe to the child who finds their own path. Bolstered by gin and cigarettes, the family endures - or survives - the changing world around them. Blending flares of imaginative theatricality, surreal farce, and deep tenderness, this beautiful roller coaster ride reveals timeless truths of love, family and forgiveness.

As I try to come to grips with the lack of control I have in terms of my own visibility and commercial success within the American Theater, I remain convinced that I have control in terms of how I see my identity. How I Learned to Drive gave me that gift. It felt as if the play was rewriting me, and I will always remember the sensation of lightness I had in the middle of the night as I wrote it. This is the gift of theater and of writing: a transubstantiation of pain and secrecy into light, into community, into understanding if not acceptance. -- Paula Vogel, from her Preface

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, Paula Vogel's How I Learned to Drive is widely recognized as a masterpiece of contemporary drama. It is published here for the first time as a stand-alone edition. Paula Vogel is the author of Indecent, The Baltimore Waltz, The Long Christmas Ride Home, Don Juan Comes Home from Iraq and A Civil War Christmas, among many other plays. She has held a distinguished career as a teacher and mentor to young playwrights, first at Brown University and then at the Yale School of Drama.

Revelatory...As intimate and immediate as a whispered secret. Vogel's play thrums with music, desire, and fear, and it's shrewd about the ways in which America isn't free, and about how art does and doesn't transcend the perilous winds of history. --New Yorker

Superbly realized...Indecent, the powerful play by Paula Vogel, sheds an eye-opening light on a little-known time when theatrical history, Jewish culture, and the frank depiction of homosexuality intersected, with explosive results. --New York Times

Gorgeous. Illuminating and heartbreaking. Rich in sympathy and humor, Indecent has the scope of an epic but the intimacy of a chamber piece...It celebrates and illustrates the power of theater. --Time Out New York

A moving and fascinating play...A singular achievement... The historical perspective is vast and knowing...Has there ever been anything quite like Indecent, a play that touches--I mean deeply touches--so much rich emotion about history and the theater, anti-Semitism, homophobia, censorship, world wars, red-baiting, and oh, yes, joyful human passion?...An extraordinary play. --Newsday

Indecent is more than a play about forbidden love: It's about theater as a life force. --New York Post

When Sholem Asch wrote God of Vengeance in 1907, he didn't imagine the height of controversy the play would eventually reach. Performing at first in Yiddish and German, the play's subject matter wasn't deemed contentious until it was produced in English, when the American audiences were scandalized by the onstage depiction of an amorous affair between two women. Paula Vogel's newest work traces the trajectory of the show's success through its tour in Europe to its abrupt and explosive demise on Broadway in 1923--including the arrest of the entire production's cast and crew.

Paula Vogel is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of How I Learned to Drive. Her other plays include Don Juan Comes Home from Iraq, A Civil War Christmas, The Long Christmas Ride Home, and The Baltimore Waltz, among others. She has also had a distinguished career as a teacher and mentor to younger playwrights, first at Brown University and then at the Yale School of Drama.

Paula Vogel's plays wake me up. Profoundly. They jump off the page and right at you. They go for the throat with enormous humanity, humor, and intelligence. Her plays are at once simple and complex, terrifying and encouraging, funny and heartbreaking. -Anne Bogart

The first major collection of Paula Vogel's work surveys a remarkable decade of her writing for the stage. Vogel's singular voice is exhilarating, comic and heartbreaking in its examination of such contemporary issues as the feminization of poverty, the nontraditional family, the AIDS epidemic, domestic violence and pornography.

Contains:

The Baltimore Waltz

And Baby Makes Seven

The Oldest Profession

Desdemona: A Play About a Handkerchief

Hot 'N' Throbbing

Pulitzer-Prize winning author of How I Learned to Drive's newest play.

The Mammary Plays are mirror-image investigations of coming of age in the '60s: How I Learned To Drive, a deceptively delicate tale of sexual awakening in desperate if not criminal circumstances, and The Mineola Twins, an outrageous political satire. Both plays are receiving multiple productions throughout the U.S., and How I Learned To Drive, one of the most acclaimed plays of 1997, has won 13 major awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, Obies, Lucille Lortel, Drama Desk, NY Drama Critics Circle and Outer Critics Circle awards and the coveted Susan Smith Blackburn Prize.

A rich and moving play with music...A Civil War Christmas taps into seasonal themes of redemption, forgiveness and community, with a decidedly American bent. -Variety

Ms. Vogel manages to humanize her many characters in a few crisp strokes of dialogue, so they come across as full-blooded people glimpsed clearly, rather than as talking statues in a historical diorama. -New York Times

A new holiday classic from Paula Vogel, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright of How I Learned to Drive. Set on a chilly Christmas Eve during the latter days of the Civil War, Paula Vogel's pageant play for all seasons weaves a tapestry of both fictional and historical characters, such as President and Mrs. Lincoln--together with holiday music, hymns and spirituals of the period--to tell a story of companionship and communal hope arising from one of our nation's darkest hours.

This volume also features a conversation between the author and the noted historian Doris Kearns Goodwin.