Originally published by American Theatre Magazine on June 5, 2024

Once begun, the play took just two weeks to write. But in many ways it had been decades in the making. So had the collaboration.

Paula Vogel and Tina Landau have known one another since the 1990s, the same decade Vogel’s late brother Carl and a version of herself first appeared onstage in her play The Baltimore Waltz. Later that decade, a version of her mother would visit audiences in the Pulitzer-winning How I Learned to Drive. So when it came to the question of who would direct Mother Play—Vogel’s latest, now at Broadway’s Helen Hayes Theater, in which memories of her brother, mother, and self interact—Vogel turned to Landau, with whom she’d worked on the 2008 Long Wharf premiere of A Civil War Christmas and its 2012 production at New York Theatre Workshop.

As is typical of both artists’ work, the roots of this current production can be traced even further back than the ‘90s, to both women’s childhoods, to Tennessee Williams and Eugene O’Neill and Clifford Odets and the whole history of American family plays, even to a little known Russian formalist named Viktor Shklovsky and his 1917 essay “Art as Device.” Eager to hear how their collaboration worked and how these influences came together to make the so-referential-it’s-practically-hyper-linked production (which has received four Tony nominations), I spoke with Vogel and Landau via Zoom. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Read more here.