How I Learned to Drive (review)

Directing Paula Vogel’s How I Learned to Drive fifteen years after its 1997 premiere, Kate Whoriskey still faced the crucial dilemma of how to explore the fraught question of Li’l Bit’s complicity in relation to her sexual education. Although Vogel’s self-described “love story” (Elizabeth Farnsworth, “A Prize-Winning Playwright,” 16 April 1998, PBS.org) between an adult and a child was jarring enough in its original context, the child sex-abuse scandals that have recently shaken the Catholic Church and Penn State University have made it all the more culturally taboo to envision minors as exercising agency in sexual encounters with adults. Whoriskey’s production was striking, then, in its resolve not to infantilize Li’l Bit or to treat her like a victim, but to instead present her as a mature and assertive female protagonist who seemed—until the play’s denouement—surprisingly in control of her remembered interactions with Uncle Peck. To this end, Whoriskey adopted an unusual approach to staging sexual memory. Unlike the play’s original director, Mark Brokaw, she did not portray Li’l Bit’s memories of her teenage driving lessons with Peck as flashbacks—sudden, involuntary re-experiences of past events; instead, she imparted a nontraumatic representation of memory, one in which Li’l Bit recounted and reassessed her unsettling coming of age without appearing to relive its details in debilitating ways. Whoriskey’s matter-of-fact approach invited audiences to find integrity in the testimony of abuse survivors, rather than suggesting—as both Brokaw’s production and lawyers for former Penn State football coach Jerry Sandusky did—that distortions of sexual memory are always inherently possible.

Elizabeth Reaser (Li’l Bit) and Norbert Leo Butz (Uncle Peck) in How I Learned to Drive. (Photo: Joan Marcus.)

In 1997, the role of Li’l Bit was played by a delicate Mary-Louise Parker, who wore a pink button-up sweater that connoted bookish inexperience during the scenes in which she played a teenager. In Brokaw’s production, the little pink sweater abruptly reappeared throughout the play’s nonlinear action; for example, Parker put it over the top of her college clothes when Li’l Bit got into a hotel bed with Peck on her eighteenth birthday. The older Li’l Bit froze or looked distressed whenever she donned this adolescent item, suggesting that the past haunted her in traumatic ways. By contrast, Whoriskey cast the more curvaceous Elizabeth Reaser as Li’l Bit. Although most of Vogel’s play is set in the 1960s, this female protagonist’s clothes were decidedly current. Reaser wore a tight sweater, skinny jeans, and mid-calf leather boots that one critic called “tough-chick boots,” claiming that they diminished the actress’s ability to convince us of Li’l Bit’s vulnerability (Lisa Schwarzbaum, “How I Learned to Drive,” 15 February 2012, EW.com). I thought Reaser’s clothes resembled trends worn by many female students at the urban campus where I teach, which made her seem not only more relevant, but also more vulnerable.

In addition to creating an aura of boldness and bravado, Whoriskey’s decision to keep Reaser in the same modern outfit throughout the play implied that this Li’l Bit’s memories were rooted in the present tense of an adult, whereas the flashbacks that Parker’s character experienced when she donned her girlhood sweater raised doubts about her reliability. The 1997 production used costumes in surreal ways that made me wonder what was real and what was imagined. For example, when an adult Li’l Bit floored the gas at the end of that show, the ghost of Uncle Peck (who drank himself to death seven years after Li’l Bit cut ties with him) sat in the back of her car, dressed in a white suit that suggested either death or redemption. Parker’s Li’l Bit wore her pink sweater and smiled widely at...