When Paula Vogel’s Pulitzer Prize-winning How I Learned to Drive first opened off-Broadway back in 1997, the term “grooming” was still most often used to suggest tending to one’s appearance and hygiene—or to those of one’s pet. Times have changed, of course, and if the play itself seems prophetic in retrospect, its Broadway premiere—in a production featuring original stars Mary-Louise Parker and David Morse, and helmed by original director Mark Brokaw—comes, alas, a bit late.
Since #MeToo became a hash tag, condemnations of predatory male behavior have exploded in every facet of media and entertainment, from personal accounts to editorials and documentaries pegged to specific celebrity predators. In the past few weeks alone, Netflix introduced one series tracing a particularly notorious case, Jimmy Savile: A British Horror Story—a chilling depiction of how the beloved BBC radio and television personality was revealed as a serial pedophile after his death—and another, Anatomy of A Scandal, also inspired by events across the Atlantic.
Drive, in contrast, is very much an American horror story, and its overdue arrival does not diminish Vogel’s achievement, or the painful potency of this staging—though the latter takes the form of a slow-burning ache more than a sharp sting. Alternately moving forward and backward in time, the playwright follows the twisted, tortured relationship between Parker’s Li’l Bit and her Uncle Peck, Morse’s character, who begins harboring an unhealthy interest in his niece before she even reaches her teens.
[Read David Finkle’s ★★★★★ review here.]
As Peck is also literally Li’l Bit’s driving instructor, Vogel uses sly automotive metaphors to shift (no pun intended) from scene to scene; they’re delivered by a “Greek chorus” of three actors who also juggle parts ranging from Li’l Bit’s teenage friends to her grandparents, mother, and aunt. If these supporting characters evoke stereotypes—the nerdy boy at the school dance, the old lady who’s been with one man since she was 14 but thinks she has them all figured out—they provide wry context for the troubled journey in focus, and are adroitly played by Johanna Day, Alyssa May Gold, and Chris Myers.
Having Gold and Myers in particular portray a range of ages benefits a production in which the leading actors are both 25 years older than they were when they introduced their roles. Vogel’s canny structure isn’t rigidly naturalistic, though, and Brokaw’s approach is lean enough to almost suggest a concert staging, framed by Rachel Hauck’s minimal set design.
It doesn’t hurt, of course, that Parker is that rare actress who has aged gracefully while remaining astonishingly well-preserved, or that her performance mines both the sardonic humor that Vogel weaves through this harrowing portrait and the vulnerability underlying Li’l Bit’s precocity. Morse, similarly, shows us the humanity simultaneously burning beneath and masking Peck’s monstrous behavior, while performing in a lower key: His voice low and soft, his manner sensitive and sometimes halting, the actor reveals his character as at once dangerously manipulative and deeply conflicted, loathsome and pitiable.
While there is no excuse for the lasting damage that Peck wreaks on Li’l Bit, Vogel points out that such men seldom appear in the world as they do in news articles; it’s precisely by fitting in that they’re able to do such irreparable harm. It’s a valuable reminder, and however familiar the subject matter of How I Learned To Drive may now seem, the play and this production will haunt you.
