The Baltimore Waltz and Other Plays

Paula Vogel

• Publisher: Theatre Communications Group
• Year: 1995
• ISBN:
  9781559367134
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Drama
• Index: Literature

• Vogel is a leading feminist playwright with a following in the gay community. • She heads the playwriting program at Brown University.

Hot ‘N’ Throbbing

PRODUCTION HISTORY

A workshop of Hot ’N’ Throbbing was directed by Anne Bogart at Circle Repertory Theatre in October 1993 with the following cast:

GIRL	Kristina Lear
BOY	Allan Heinberg
WOMAN	Leslie Lyles
MAN	Jeffrey LeBeau
VOICE-OVER	Zoey Zimmerman
THE VOICE	Robert Watson

Hot ’N’ Throbbing opened April 16, 1994 at the Hasty Pudding Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The play was produced by American Repertory Theatre under Robert Brustein, Artistic Director, with a grant from the Fund for New American Plays, a project of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts with support from the American Express Company, in cooperation with the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities. It was directed by Anne Bogart, with sets by Christine Jones, lights by John Ambrosone, sound and music by Christopher Walker and costumes by Jenny Fulton. The cast was as follows:

GIRL	Amy Louise Lammert
BOY	Randall Jaynes
WOMAN	Diane D’Aquila
MAN	Jack Willis
VOICE-OVER	Alexandra Loria
THE VOICE	Royal Miller

SOME PLAYS ONLY DAUGHTERS CAN WRITE.

Hot ’N’ Throbbing was written on a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship—because obscenity begins at home.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

I began work on this play in 1985. While I was driving the streets of Providence late at night, suddenly the vision of the play’s ending came upon me with a terrible clarity. I knew that I would have to face this play in my future, and that certainty fueled a fear that kept me driving the deserted downtown streets in circles.

It was not until 1990, after my brother’s illness and Baltimore Waltz, that I sat down with a reading list to begin research on the play. Again, late at night, as I began reading about domestic violence, I thought I heard a woman’s cry—it was past midnight, and the street outside my house was abandoned. I would turn a page of my book, hear a faint cry, stop and listen. Was it an intimate response somewhere in the night to a couple’s love-making or something more dangerous? I concentrated on the sound until I could pinpoint the source. Taking my house keys with me, I ventured out on the street. There I saw, half a block down, a car idling in the middle of the street. When I heard a man’s voice say: “Shut up, bitch,” and thought I saw a drawn knife inside the car, my worst fears were confirmed. I ran back to the house, started my own car and drove behind the car at a fast pace until I could flag down a police car to pursue the chase. Finally, the car was stopped by police; a shaking woman emerged, bleeding from a cut to her face.

She declined to press charges.

As I continued to work on the play, I kept a file filled with clippings from the Providence Journal on incidents of domestic violence. Providence is a relatively small city, of approximately 190,000 residents. Within less than a year, the file was crammed two inches thick. Domestic violence was all around us as I wrote.

Incentive to finish the play came from Senator Jesse Helms and Congress; the obscenity pledge now had to be signed by all recipients of the National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, in which fellows would pledge not to write or create art that caused offense to the community. I applied for an NEA grant, received one and wrote Hot ’N’ Throbbing to see just what would be perceived as pornographic, eager to test the censorship of ...