How I Learned to Drive Comes to Broadway

Ewwww! That’s not my critique of Paula Vogel’s tight memory play, How I Learned to Drive-- rather the play, now having a Broadway debut after 25 years-- is brilliant. It’s the people: the family. At center, Uncle Peck and Li’l Bit (the sublime actors David Morse and Mary-Louise Parker) who originated these roles Off Broadway. You will wonder, what took them so long to get to Broadway? And you will marvel at how prescient the play is of the present moment. And then, you will realize just how normal and natural that “ewwww” factor really was all along.

Affable and courteous, Uncle Peck held Li’l Bit in his hand as she was born, he said, and from there he’s loved her every day, from that time, and when she was eleven, and he asked to unbutton her shirt as she sat on his lap. “Only if you want,” he said. And continues to say even when he courts her with gifts and encourages her martinis. And teaches her to drive. Which becomes a structural device marking scenes but also providing a nuanced and loaded language: avoid reverse gear and idling.

That day, at eleven, was the last time she had any agency over her body, says Li’l Bit, which echoes the trending words of today’s “#Metoo” survivors, giving the play a special poignance as it traces just how easily one man’s charm can overwhelm another’s vulnerability, even as a mother, aunt, grandmother, grandfather note the signs of this grooming with more resignation than attention. Johanna Day was in the original as mother and Aunt Mary, married to Uncle Peck. Alyssa May Gold, is way too young to be a grandmother, a nice touch as much of her child bride backstory is revealed. Chris Myers plays the other male roles, including a rude classmate fixated on Li’l Bit’s bosom. If anyone has ever wondered how such transgressions occur, the stages are acted out here at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater under Mark Brokaw’s fine direction, peeled back non-chronologically, as the mind brings forward every icky, salient, mesmerizing moment.