Playwright Paula Vogel and director Molly Smith have been friends and colleagues for so long that at times they seem to share the same thoughts. When they show up for an interview in Smith's office, they take one look at each other and laugh as they realize they are both wearing bolo ties. (Smith immediately removes hers.)

A native of the Pacific Northwest, Smith is completing her first season as artistic director of Washington's Arena Stage. Vogel, a former Marylander, won the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for her play "How I Learned to Drive," the current production at Arena's Kreeger Theater, under Smith's direction. Their work in Washington is a homecoming for both women, who met as transfer students at Catholic University in 1972.

Smith spent the last two decades as artistic director of Alaska's Perseverance Theatre, which she founded. Vogel -- who has just stepped down as head of the graduate playwriting program at Brown University in Providence, R.I. -- wrote and developed several scripts at Perseverance, including "How I Learned to Drive" and "The Mineola Twins," now playing off-Broadway, starring Swoosie Kurtz.

Smith instituted some changes at Arena immediately, such as deciding to produce only American playwrights and appointing Vogel writer in residence for three seasons.

Next season will open with Smith's staging of a revised version of "Hot 'n' Throbbing," Vogel's 1994 play about pornography and domestic violence. The following season, Arena will produce the first play created by Vogel during her residency. A holiday show called "A Civil War Christmas," it may include community participation -- perhaps a re-enactment troop setting up camp outside the theater or schoolchildren playing the parts of war orphans.

In conversation, Vogel and Smith, both 47, are too polite to interrupt each other or finish each other's sentences. But they thrive on bouncing ideas back and forth. Here are edited excerpts from their conversation.

Smith: What I remember first about you had to do with your intelligence, because in classrooms, I think we took a couple classes together, and you were always the one who had the best questions for the teacher, the smartest questions for the professors, and I loved how you could make them sweat.

And I remember one particular professor -- you were just rat-a-tat-tatting questions at him in a theater history class, and when he stepped away from the blackboard, there was sweat on the blackboard. And now you continue, now you make audiences sweat. You've never been afraid of controversy, Paula. You've never been afraid of conflict, and because of that, I think that's often what makes your work so interesting, too.

There was a man who was talking this past weekend about how, when one goes out in a kayak and is moving toward a large rock, what do you do to get around the rock, to not hit the rock? Do you lean away from the rock or do you lean into the rock? It's counter-intuitive, but you lean into the rock. You lean into the conflict as opposed to moving away from it because when you move away from it, the kayak rolls and you're in trouble. So I think it's the same thing that I see in you and your personality: You lean into the rock.

Vogel: You know, it's an interesting thing that you say that, because my perception of our collaboration is actually the reverse. I know my public persona is not afraid of controversy, and I know that the playwriting persona goes toward the rock. But privately, I actually don't like causing pain. I'm frightened of rejection. I want acceptance and embrace. And you're the one in this collaboration that I feel always keeps me going toward the rock because I will have a tendency to write something and then shy away from it. And you're the one who goes, "No, you're right, we've got to go there." You'll push me farther than I would go. I might back away.

Vogel: "Hot 'n' Throbbing" is probably, for me, maybe one of the most painful and difficult plays I'll ever write, and, of course, it's also dangerously funny. Most artistic directors, when they pick up the script or we talk about it, their hands start to tremble ever so slightly about doing this. I don't think it's because the play is hard to understand. The question is: Can we as contemporary playwrights do what Shakespeare and the Greeks are doing? Are we permitted, as American playwrights, to examine, in our midst, the wars that are going on, in our country, in our borders and in our living rooms that the Greeks examined and that Shakespeare and his contemporaries examined?

Smith: It is one of your plays that has burned itself more in my memory than anything else. I had a meeting with someone about six months ago who said to me, "What's the thing that really gets you going? What's the play that you really want to direct?" I woke up the next morning, and it was "Hot 'n' Throbbing," "Hot 'n' Throbbing." So I called you, and I said, "Let's do it. Let's open the season with it, so that it's right out there in front."

Vogel: Didn't I try to talk you out of it?

Smith: No. What you did, we were right here in this office, and you fell on your knees. You said, "You took me to my knees." Remember this? Then we both started laughing and said, "Well, let's just do it."

Vogel: I said, "Molly, Arena needs a Christmas show. Arena needs a Christmas show that happens in D.C. It's for the Washington community." Why not do a Christmas show about what really hurts us? Why are we not doing a Christmas show about race and poverty and the Civil War?

Smith: You called me and said, "I have it!" And I said, "Great," and you said, "I'm going to wait until we have dinner tonight." So we're eating dinner in a very good Italian restaurant and it had paper tablecloths, and so we went in and began to eat, and you basically channeled the play. So I just wrote furiously on the tablecloth.

I think that probably the way that I serve Paula is that I'm some kind of a vessel through which you have tons and tons of ideas, which you feed me and then at a certain point, I just kind of focus. So, this was a great example of that. You just went on and on and on with all these different ideas, and at the end, we just tore off the tablecloth and you put it in your pocket, and we had this play.

Vogel: It takes place in a single evening, Dec. 24, 1864. It's going to be the story of the collision of three soldiers on the last Christmas eve of the Civil War -- a black soldier who's guarding a Union supply depot; a starting Confederate soldier who's like 15 years old, from Mosby's Rangers, who crosses over to raid the supply depot; and a white Union soldier who's an undergraduate from Brown University.

Smith: I think that we're in a very technological world right now, and I think that the world is cold. I think that one of the places that can provide heat is the theater because it's about human connection. It's about the personal. It's about interaction. I think that we're desperate to hear and to understand why we are the way we are as human beings.

Vogel: For me, theater is also important because we have to think of what the American identity is going to be in the 21st century, and it's interesting, I mean, this is not a white world. It is not a white country. Theater offers a way of forging identity and, in terms of theater coming back, there is this developing generation of younger playwrights of color -- Latino, African-American, Caribbean, Asian-American. I am so filled with hope in that they are starting to turn to theater. I'm hoping they will remain in theater as a way of forging that identity, that cultural identity.

One writes, one directs What: "How I Learned to Drive"

When: 7:30 p.m. Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Sundays; 8 p.m. Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays; selected matinees 2:30 p.m. Saturdays, 2 p.m. Sundays and noon Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Through June 20

Where: Arena Stage, 1101 Sixth St. S.W., Washington

Tickets: $26-$45

Call: 202-488-3300

Pub Date: 05/16/99