SOURCE: Savran, David. “Loose Screws.” In The Baltimore Waltz and Other Plays, by Paula Vogel, pp. ix-xv. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1996.

In the following essay, Savran provides a thematic and stylistic overview of Vogel's work.

Shortly after I met Paula Vogel—twenty years ago in a seminar room at Cornell University—she told me a story I have never forgotten. Although I couldn't know it at the time, it proved to be the best possible introduction to the extraordinary plays that she would go on to write. The story involves Paula, her mother Phyllis and her older brother, Carl, and takes place somewhere in the suburban sprawl between Baltimore and Washington.

When Paula was thirteen years old, her mother, recently divorced and with a reputation for being something of a trouble-maker, complained to the Board of Health about the trash collection—or lack of it—in their...