IN CONVERSATION - JESSICA LANGE and PAULA VOGEL

Actor JESSICA LANGE and playwright PAULA VOGEL on their new BROADWAY PRODUCTION, MOTHER PLAY, creating and portraying COMPLICATED WOMEN, and the FUTURE of THEATER

For more than four decades, playwright and theater educator and impulses we often shy away from. Vogel's Obie Award-winning 1992 tragicomic play, The Baltimore Waltz, was a meditation on the AIDS crisis at a time when the disease-and the fear, stigmatization, and misinformation that surrounded it - was wreaking devastation. Her 1994 one-act play, Hot 'N' Throbbing, explored the relationship between pornography and domestic violence, while 1997's How I Learned to Drive dealt with sexual abuse and misogyny and earned her a Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

Vogel made her Broadway debut in 2017 with Indecent, which mused on queer love, antisemitism, and censorship. This month marks her return with the world premiere of Mother Play, produced by Second Stage Theater and directed by Tina Landau, about the mistakes parents inevitably make and how families can move on from trauma. The play's narrative centers on Phyllis, played by Jessica Lange, who is left penniless by her unfaithful husband to raise her two children, Carl (Jim Parsons) and Martha (Celia Keenan-Bolger), on her own as they attempt to navigate regrets, resentments, dashed expectations, and fateful decisions over the course of 40 years.

Lange, who has portrayed an array of complex female characters over the course of her career - all while raising her own three children - was at the top of Vogel's wish list to play Phyllis. In addition to her Oscar-winning work in Tootsie (1982) and Blue Sky (1994) and critically lauded roles in films like Frances (1982), Country (1984), and Sweet Dreams (1985), Lange has, in more recent years, become a mainstay of the Ryan Murphy universe, appearing in five iterations of his American Horror Story anthology series and starring as Joan Crawford alongside Susan Sarandon's Bette Davis in the first season of Feud. Most recently, she appeared in Feud: Capote vs. the Swans as Capote's mother, Lillie Mae Faulk.