NEW YORK — When Paula Vogel’s “How I Learned to Drive” opened in 1997 with Mary-Louise Parker in the lead role, the depiction of sexual abuse on stage was close to nonexistent. This long running off-Broadway play, which charts the systematic abuse of a young woman by her uncle, explained, with total clarity, rich complexity and calm logic, how it can appear that victims of abuse are willing participants, even though that could not be further from the truth.
People, especially men, who had never understood that before went to see this play (which later starred Molly Ringwald and others) and left newly enlightened. Given how many regional theaters and colleges produced Vogel’s masterwork around the turn of the millennium (I saw it numerous times), it is not overstating things to posit that this play helped expose abuse, especially within families, a crucial and especially devastating locus.
By explaining the warning signs of grooming to those who could easily miss them, it probably saved some lives. There are not many plays about which you can make that claim. With this one, you can.
Now Manhattan Theatre Club has revived the work on Broadway at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, directed by Mark Brokaw and starring the same two actors, Parker and David Morse, who first appeared in the work some 25 years ago.
For those of us who saw it the first time, it is a fascinating experiment involving two immensely skilled, in-the-moment performers who always grasped the importance of understating what is a horrific relationship, so as to better make the playwright’s point that intimacy evolves easily in close family settings, such as the suburban world depicted here.
The main character, Li’l Bit, enjoys the early attentions of her Uncle Peck, both in teaching her to drive and in taking her underage self out for sophisticated cocktails on the shore, as she has been taught to do. What young girl would not?
He leads her in such an awful way that she becomes, she eventually tells us in her narration, unable to live any longer in her own body, but only in her head. As Parker delivers that line, your head goes to what has occurred, to what behavior has been revealed, over the last 20 years. Truly, “How I Learned to Drive” was a groundbreaking play, if you can imagine that adjective being used for the first time.
Does the play work now that these actors are so much older?
In the case of Parker, a riveting, restless explorer of the human psyche who can bend time, it seems, it truly does. This is, after all, a memory play and memories abide and perhaps even clarify. That said, and with all due respect to a remarkable actor, Morse feels rather less sexually menacing. That might well be a smokescreen or even a dangerous learned stereotype, given the way abuse issues often play out in reality. But if you recall the energy of his manipulations the last time, the way he clung on Li’l Bit’s youth like an insect sucking blood, you will feel the difference this time around.
As compensation, though, there is the palpable depth of these actor’s shared history with this play, as manifest in the casual intimacy of their characters. You feel like they have known each other for years, as the play makes clear they have.
It’s an unsettling experience, of course, now produced at an unsettling moment when most of our attention has been placed elsewhere. As such, it dislocates and worries in a way that I don’t think was true in 1997. You deserve to be appraised of that.
As we all know, the world only spins forward and yet the habits and predilections of some always seem to find a way to adapt.
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