Paula Vogel in one of America’s greatest playwrights. A CIVIL WAR CHRISTMAS is her gift to her nation. Ours is a complex story of a society’s struggle to reach its highest self. Our shared history as Americans is rife with contradiction: a history celebrated by some and criticized by others. Is America the beacon of Freedom we like to believe or is America a fractured society that alienates anyone outside accepted notions of White European heritage? The answers for these questions aren’t found easily. In A CIVIL WAR CHRISTMAS, Paula Vogel gives us a story that celebrates the best of who we can be but never allows us to forget our work, as a people, is
not finished. We wanted to embody the highest ideals in Paula’s play. A story that is our story. It belongs to all of us. We all can, and must, claim it—own it.Tonight you will see Americans of all kinds telling our shared American story. Tonight is not a history lesson, but an exercise in doing all we can, as Americans, to claim our story. The cast you see on stage and the music you hear are a direct reflections of that ideal. Tonight we embrace ourselves as a society and hold up a mirror to the world we live in today, while never forgetting that our destinies are inexorably linked by a complicated and shared history. Wherever we go we will be together, and as is so often the case, there is more that unites us than divides us.
I hope you enjoy our gift to you. Thank you for sharing your evening with us.
PAULA VOGEL
Paula Vogel’s play HOW I LEARNED TO DRIVE received the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, the Lucille Lortel, Drama Desk, Outer Critics Circle and New York Drama Critics Awards for Best Play, as well as her second OBIE Award. HOW I LEARNED TO DRIVE has since been produced all over the world. Other plays include A CIVIL WAR CHRISTMAS, THE LONG CHRISTMAS RIDE HOME, THE MINEOLA TWINS, HOT ‘N’ THROBBING, THE BALTIMORE WALTZ, DESDEMONA, AND BABY MAKES SEVEN and THE OLDEST PROFESSION. Her play INDECENT will open on Broadway in April 2017. Her plays have been produced by Second Stage, New York Theatre Workshop, Vineyard Theatre, Roundabout and Circle Repertory Company. Her plays have been produced regionally all over the country at the Center Stage, Intiman, Trinity Repertory, Woolly Mammoth, Huntington Theatre, Magic Theatre, The Goodman Theatre, American Repertory Theatre, Dallas Theatre, Berkeley Repertory and Alley Theatres to name a few. Harrogate Theatre and the Donmar Theatre have produced her work in England. Her plays have been produced in Canada, Great Britain, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand as well as translated and produced in Italy, Germany, Taiwan, South Africa, Australia, Romania, Croatia, Czech Republic, Poland, Slovenia, Canada, Portugal, France, Greece, Japanese, Norway, Finland, Iceland, Peru, Argentina, Chile, Mexico, Brazil and other countries. John Simon once remarked that Paula Vogel had more awards than a “black sofa collects lint.” Some of these include induction into the Theatre Hall of Fame, the Thornton Wilder Award, Lifetime Achievement from the Dramatists Guild, the William Inge Award, the Elliott Norton Award, two Obies, a Susan Smith Blackburn Award, the PEN/ Laura Pels Award, a TCG residency award, a Guggenheim, a Pew Charitable Trust Award, and fellowships and residencies at Sundance Theatre Lab, Hedgebrook, The Rockefeller Center’s Bellagio Center, Yaddo, MacDowell and the Bunting. But she is particularly proud of her Thirtini Award from 13P, and honored by three awards in her name: the Paula Vogel Award for playwrights given by The Vineyard Theatre, the Paula Vogel Award from the American College Theatre Festival, and the Paula Vogel mentorship program, curated by Quiara Hudes and Young Playwrights of Philadelphia.
Welcome to Artists Rep. Though the word “Christmas” is on the title page of today’s playbill, I think of Paula Vogel’s A CIVIL WAR CHRISTMAS as our “post-election play.” This year’s holidays coincide with the aftermath of what has been an exhausting, polarized civil war of words and ideologies. Can we recover from this? Can we hope for a future built on constructive dialogue aimed at the resolution of conflict? It’s easy to despair, but I find comfort in reflecting on our much darker, more troubled past.
Vogel’s story is set on Christmas Eve in 1864, but this play—like all theatre— ultimately takes place in what Thornton Wilder called “perpetual present time.” In other words, this story is both 1864 and 2016; a contemporary telling of our shared history by our community for our community. It’s in this spirit that we have commissioned seven local luminary musicians with wildly different musical styles to create contemporary interpretations of 19th Century carols, marches and spiritual music. Using Daryl Waters’ original score as a foundation, we invited each artist to stay true to their own 21st Century musical aesthetic. Today you’ll hear jazz, folk, rock, pop, blues, Latin guitar and Ghanaian rhythms performed live by an extraordinary cast of actor/singer/musicians representing contemporary Portland. Bobby Brewer- Wallin’s costumes allow the actors to play themselves as the Chorus while also donning elements of period clothing to make subtle shifts into myriad characters. The resulting performance is a dialogue between the United States’ troubling past and our still-struggling present. The very fact that this diverse company of artists has worked in unison to tell this difficult story and to sing together with joy—and that you’re here to participate as an audience—gives me hope in the possibility of achieving that “more perfect union” to which we continue to aspire.
No matter your religion or tradition, the holiday season affords many of us a much-needed opportunity to celebrate our shared humanity as one community. On behalf of all of us at Artists Rep, I wish you a happy holiday season!
Until next year, Dámaso Rodríguez
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