Puppets and politics: set at Christmas, Paula Vogel's new play focuses on three children, played at times by puppets, but its real target is homophobia.

When playwright Paula Vogel takes the wheel, you're in for an exhilarating ride. How I Learned to Drive, which won her the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for drama, was a controversial tale of a girl's sexual awakening, abuse, and empowerment at the hands of her uncle. Now the out writer is taking audiences on another theatrical journey: The Long Christmas Ride Home, which explores the dynamics of the American family from the perspective of three children sitting in the backseat of a car. What's especially exhilarating about this ride is that the children are played by a combination of adult actors and child-size puppets created by gay puppet artist Basil Twist.

The use of puppets solved a dramatic dilemma for Vogel: "How can one as an adult look at oneself as a child in a way that will not traumatize the audience but will make them follow the journeys of all the characters on to adulthood?" The play, which was scheduled to open November 4 at New York's Vineyard Theatre, thus pays tribute to the works of Thornton Wilder while at the same time utilizing stage techniques inspired by the Bunraku puppetry tradition of Japanese theater.

Twist, best known lot his underwater minispectacle Symphonie Fantastique, was just the collaborator Vogel needed. "There is almost a spiritual purity about Basil's work, something that when you watch it makes us all children," site says. "Traumatic things may happen to us in childhood, but because it is our childhood there is a sense of beauty and magic to it. I wanted the play to capture a kind of terrible beauty."

Even with its puppet twist, The Long Christmas Ride Home bears all the Vogel hallmarks: humor, compassion, unflinching honesty, and a political voice filtered through family drama. In the play the three siblings in the backseat are hurtled into the future when their ear spins out of control on the way back from a disastrous family dinner. The flash-forward reveals the extent to which their lives--that of the boy in particular--are shaped by the prejudices and fears they encountered in their own family.

"So at this one special day of the year, we are seeing all the patterns come together that put up the boundary lines inside the American family," Vogel says. "I chose Christmas because for us in America, regardless of whether we are Christian, it is the closest thing to myth we have. At the time when we are supposed to be experiencing charity and embracing everyone inside as well as outside the home, I wanted to show how the children were outcasts in their own home."

Make no mistake: This Christmas play with children and puppets is also political. "I am revisiting one of my primary concerns, which is that it's homophobia, not so much as AIDS, which kills us in tiffs country," Vogel says.

That concern also underlines her breakthrough 1992 play, The Baltimore Waltz, a moving and whimsical memorial to her brother Carl. "One of the great gifts that my late brother gave to me was an understanding that homophobia and misogyny are all about policing our gender--what it means to be a man or a woman in this country," Vogel says. "I think it is culturally universal, but I don't think it is innate. In the words of Rodgers and Hammer-stein, 'You've got to be carefully taught.' I am upset by this story, and I will not shut up about it. We are living in the Bush administration. This is a dangerous time to be quiet."

Based in New York City, Raymond writes about theater for several publications.