How I Learned to Drive Review: A Three-Alarm Fire at the Manhattan Theatre Club

The omnipresent horror of what we so quickly understand to be happening diminishes the play’s proximity to pleasure more than it should.

How I Learned to Drive
Photo: Jeremy Daniel

It’s hard now to imagine someone writing the headline for Ben Brantley’s 1997 New York Times review of the off-Broadway production of Paula Vogel’s How I Learned to Drive: “A Pedophile Even Mother Could Love.” Twenty-five years later, the Pulitzer Prize-winning play is still hard to watch, but what audiences might have experienced as complex dynamics, grey areas, and blurred lines of consent back in 1997—the kind of uncertainty that spurred Brantley to describe Uncle Peck’s crimes against Li’l Bit as “in some appalling way, a real love story”—will resonate now with all the ambiguity of a three-alarm fire.

Across How I Learned to Drive, Vogel non-chronologically unpeels the sexually abusive relationship of an uncle and niece, played by David Morse and Mary-Louise Parker, who reprise their original roles in the new Broadway revival at the Manhattan Theatre Club. The possibility that audiences might feel anything other than revulsion for Uncle Peck (Morse) relies on the first scene leaving open an interpretation of mutuality, as he gropes his 17-year-old niece, Li’l Bit (Parker), in a car while reassuring her that “I’m not going to do anything you don’t want me to do.” Li’l Bit, after all, is sexually forward, sometimes even inviting.

But I think that, hope that, most audiences now see immediately through the seductive dialogue, if they didn’t before the #MeToo era, to the power differential, the wariness and weariness of Li’l Bit’s consent, and the fact that she’s a minor, long before Vogel unveils the sickening pre-teen origins of the abuse. Gradations of predatory behavior seem less slippery than they did in 1997. “Does it help that I’m in-law?” Uncle Peck asks, winkingly. It doesn’t.

Advertisement

And while Morse often highlights Uncle Peck’s tremulous tenderness, especially in less overtly sexual scenes, as in one in which Li’l Bit tries to convince him to quit drinking, it’s hard to see anything other than the manipulations of a menacing figure, try as the play might to subtly muddy our perceptions early on. What stings most sharply, then, as the play progresses are the unbearable betrayals of Li’l Bit’s other relatives: the mother, aunt, and grandparents (Johanna Day, also from the original cast, plays the former two roles, and Alyssa May Gold and Chris Myers play the latter), who show themselves to be complicit, drenching themselves in vulgarity to cope with their own traumas. (Li’l Bit’s grandmother, for example, married at 14.)

Li’l Bit grows up in 1960s Maryland in a household obsessed with sex; for one, the nicknames that her family creates, her own included, are descriptors of genitalia. At the dinner table, her hypocritical grandparents mock the girl’s breast size but express horror when she utters the word “goddamn.” Her grandfather also ridicules her academic aspirations, demanding to know, “How is Shakespeare going to help her lie on her back in the dark?” An audience member at a talkback following a preview performance of the revival went so far as to term Li’l Bit’s entire household “sexually abusive,” and, indeed, the sustained tension of How I Learned to Drive emerges most potently from how violently Li’l Bit’s community lets hers down.

How I Learned to Drive
A scene from How I Learned to Drive.. © Jeremy Daniel.

Li’l Bit serves as our narrator, conjuring up fragments of her childhood with the help of a Greek chorus (played by Day, Gold, and Myers). With often spirited silliness, this ensemble assists Li’l Bit in telling her story, supported by goofy sound effects and lighting cues. But as much as Li’l Bit would like to remember her childhood through a gauze of whimsy, she can’t avoid the truth that everyone who should have loved her only hurt her. “If anything happens, I hold you responsible,” Li’l Bit’s mother tells her in perhaps the play’s most horrifying moment. Mark Brokaw, director of the original production and this revival, leans with intentionality into playfulness whenever he can, but the omnipresent horror of what we so quickly understand to be happening diminishes the play’s proximity to pleasure more than it should.

Advertisement

How I Learned to Drive is most effective when it engages head-on with the fraught relationship between the middle-aged narrator’s memories and the real experiences of the child she once was (“A Walk Down Mammary Lane,” the adult Li’l Bit punnily titles one moment from her past that she’s recalling). A shocking soliloquy delivered by Aunt Mary in which she blames her niece, insisting that “she knows exactly what she’s doing,” exists, it seems, only in Li’l Bit’s imagination, a refraction of her own adult self-loathing.

Parker is spellbinding in her age-shifting performance. She never changes costumes, yet conveys the sense when playing the adolescent Li’l Bit that she hasn’t quite grown into her clothes, as if she’s shrinking into herself. Like the sexagenarian Victoria Clark, who played a wildly convincing teen earlier this season in Kimberly Akimbo, Parker softens her shoulders or slackens her gaze to instantly fall into an unprotected adolescence. As she moves in and out of her own timeline, there’s no sense that Li’l Bit’s knowledge of whom she will become keeps her safe when she remembers the past: Her visceral vulnerability in those scenes of childhood assaults cannot be spared by the retrospective certainty of her survival.

And Parker is best in those reflective moments that cast doubt on what it means to be a survivor. The play ends with a chilling image that communicates the long-lasting shadow of trauma in a way that most of the play only gestures toward. It’s only through the lens of the grownup Li’l Bit’s reminiscences to the audience, when Uncle Peck is long in the rearview mirror of her life, that the boundaries between good and evil face a challenge.

Advertisement

At one point in How I Learned to Drive, Li’l Bit admits to having a one-night-stand with a high school senior while she was in her late 20s. “I lay in my back in the dark and I thought about you Uncle Peck,” she confesses, cautiously. “Oh. Oh—this is the allure. Being older. Being the first. Being the translator, the teacher, the epicure, the already jaded.” As Li’l Bit tries to justify her uncle’s behavior by justifying her own, are we doing the same? Filtered through her battered memory, are those lines beginning to blur once more?

How I Learned to Drive is now running at the Manhattan Theatre Club.

Dan Rubins

Dan Rubins is a writer, composer, and arts nonprofit leader. He’s also written about theater for CurtainUp, Theatre Is Easy, A Younger Theatre, and the journal Shakespeare. Check out his podcast The Present Stage.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.