Speaking in 1997, Paula Vogel confessed that ‘I want to seduce the audience. If they can go along for a ride they wouldn't ordinarily take, or don't even know they are taking, then they might see highly charged political issues in a new and unexpected way’. There could hardly be a better or more concise description of her method or philosophy, for while she plainly has her commitments, and locates her work in a politicised environment, she is no ideologue. If her plays are, in a sense, a dialogue with her culture, the nature of that dialogue is open. Neither of the sisters in The Mineola Twins – one conservative, the other radical – has a monopoly on, or, indeed, a firm grasp of truth, anymore than the male protagonist of How I Learned to Drive, who seduces an eleven-year-old girl, could be said to be adequately described by the single word ‘paedophile’. Vogel's plays do, indeed, take her audiences on a journey they would not ordinarily take but what is unusual about that journey is not only that it frequently takes them into the world of the fantastic and the bizarre but that it liberates them from a Manichaean frame of mind, from a binary mode of thought. Her politics are more inclusive than exclusive, even child abuse turning out to be, in her words, ‘greyer’ than most would be prepared to acknowledge. Indeed, it is a journey of understanding no less for the writer than for those for whom she writes.