Award-winning playwright Paula Vogel in 2003.

JOURNAL FILES / CONNIE GROSCH

Paula Vogel says her move to Yale is all about taking “a different approach.”

“There comes a point at which I need to go back to school myself, and look at things another way,” said Vogel, who is giving up her post as head of the playwriting program at Brown after 24 years to chair the playwriting department at the Yale School of Drama.

“I’m convinced I’ll learn a lot.”

The Pulitzer Prize-winning dramatist said she loves her students at Brown but feels she has done all she can with the program there. She is now looking forward to “getting in the sand box” with her colleagues at Yale.

“Anyone in the American theater today is working alongside the Yale School of Drama,” she said. “It’s a fact of our field.”

Vogel, 56, said she is also looking forward to working with the Yale Repertory Theatre and New Haven’s Long Wharf Theatre. Plans are underfoot to stage her new play about Christmastime during the Civil War at the Long Wharf. And there is talk of making her the theater’s playwright-in-residence or artistic associate.

The chance to work with both those theaters makes her feel as though she has “fallen into the honey pot as a writer,” she said.

“To be able to immerse myself in my teaching and literally get to the Long Wharf rehearsal stage in a five-minute drive, I find very appealing.”

Yale has one of the most prestigious drama schools in the country. But Vogel said her reasons for leaving Providence had more to do with a new way of looking at things.

“If you really love any art form,” she said, “you want to learn as many approaches as you can.”

Still, leaving Brown will be hard. She never thought she’d have a “day job” for 24 years.

But she said she watched Oskar Eustis leave Trinity Rep to take over the Public Theatre in New York, and she must do the same.

“Change is painful, but it’s good,” she said. “It’s what you have to do as an artist.”

Vogel, one of the most widely produced playwrights in the country, taught courses in theater and women’s studies at Cornell before coming to Brown. Her plays include How I Learned to Drive, for which she won the Pulitzer, The Mineola Twins and The Baltimore Waltz, inspired by the death of her brother from AIDS.

Vogel said she’ll be getting an apartment in New Haven, but splitting her down time between the Edgewood section of Cranston, where she has a house with her longtime partner Ann Fausto-Sterling (the couple was married four years ago in Massachusetts), and Cape Cod, where she keeps a summer writing retreat. Providence will remain near to her heart, though.

“Will I ever fall in love with New Haven like I have with Providence? No.”

Vogel has just finished the ninth draft of her Civil War Christmas, which takes place on the last Christmas Eve of the Civil War, in 1864. It’s a play that deals with the meaning of Christmas, one that looks at the issues of war and the obligations of people to one another at a time of crisis. Much of the inspiration for it comes from Dickens’ Nicholas Nickleby.

The play is set to music of the period, to a series of Christmas carols, spirituals and Civil War ballads, said Vogel. She said she wrote it with her 4-year-old niece in mind.

“I have started other work, but until every word feels as perfect as it can be, I’m not going to turn my attention from this one. It’s the longest thing I’ve ever written.”

Vogel said Trinity Rep had considered Civil War Christmas, which she has been working on for years, but that it turned out not to be a “priority” for the theater.

Vogel will be interviewing applicants for the Yale playwriting program this winter and spring and start work at the school in July. But she also plans to spend time on the Cape writing her memoirs. She has about 50 pages written to date, but no plans yet for publication.

Her appointment is for five years, but she expects to be at Yale longer than that.

“I’m thinking ten more years,” said Vogel. “I want to stay with it for as long as I have this energy, for as long as I continue to get this much joy out of it.”

cgray@projo.com