It took a brave playwright to write How I Learned to Drive and it takes a brave company to stage it now, and if you go to see it with an open heart, you are a brave person, too.
How I Learned to Drive is a story about a young girl, Li’l Bit (Alyssa Wilmoth Keegan), who suffers at the hands of her pedophilic Uncle Peck (Peter O’Connor), but it is broader and deeper than that. Peck, a chronic drunk whose attachment to Li’l Bit is profoundly sexual but also insanely romantic, may actually be the least fearsome member of Li’l Bit’s sex-drunk family. What’s more, she lives in a universe — our universe — where sex is a weapon and a tool for pain and humiliation.
Paula Vogel shows a mirror to nature, and in so doing reminds us how shallow and foolish we are to imagine that we can resolve the problem by firing the perpetrator, or suing him, or putting him in jail. Li’l Bit (she hates the nickname, which refers to her sexual parts, but no one calls her by anything else) lives among country folks in rural Maryland whose view of sex proceeds from the barnyard. Big Papa (Craig Wallace), a growling misogynistic bigot, presides over the brood, and to hear how he captured and mated with Li’l Bit’s grandmother (Daven Ralston), fourteen at the time, with her sisters chasing him out of the house with brooms, is to hear the story of the fox invading the chicken house. Big Papa retells the story with relish, and — this is crucial — his wife smiles indulgently to hear it again.
See, How I Learned to Drive is not simply a story of the patriarchy in its most brutal form. It is a story of the conspiracy between men and women to keep us all in a sexual dystopia. Later, mom (Emily Townley) and grandma talk with Li’l Bit about how they use sex to manipulate men. “They’re children,” says grandma, and she means it; she treats Big Papa exactly as she might treat a six-year-old, one with whom she has sex, frequently.
Li’l Bit is sexually harassed by her own family constantly (Big Papa wonders why she would want to go to college, since her future will consist principally of lying on her back) but it is no different away from them; a classmate gropes her in the guise of having an allergy attack; two girls in the locker room ogle her well-developed breasts; and even Li’l Bit herself participates in this destructive choreography, going to a sock hop and then refusing to dance with a polite young classmate because he is short.
It is this context, rather than anything about Peck, which helps us understand Li’l Bit’s sympathy toward him. Some critics have called Peck charming, but O’Connor doesn’t play him that way. He is instead a desperate man, sweatily pleading to kiss her breasts, or to hold her, fully clothed, next to him in bed. In that, he is like any teenage swain, except that he is her forty-five-year-old uncle, who held her in the palm of his hand on the day she was born.
Li’l Bit is one of the most complicated characters on the modern stage, and Keegan nails her. Li’l Bit is not simply imperiled Pauline. She is aware of her own burgeoning sexuality, as powerful as any narcotic — including the booze that both she and Peck turn to when they turn away from each other. She is programmed to have sex, as we all have been since the time when protozoa ruled the world, and when she yields, however briefly, to that programming she is filled with visible shame and remorse. Keegan, telling the story in retrospective, sounds brave and frightened (all brave people are frightened; that’s what makes them brave), and when she alights in the past — a thirteen-year-old, posing for Peck’s camera; an eleven-year-old, begging him not to drink, at twenty-seven, having seduced a much younger man and thinking of Peck in the aftermath — she becomes the Li’l Bit of her time, fully and convincingly.
The text calls for three other actors to play multiple roles. Vogel calls these three roles the “Greek Chorus”, which has the effect of universalizing the dilemma. Thus Big Papa, for example, is not simply Li’l Bit’s grandfather but every brutal male aggressor and everyone who admires such a person. Round House Theatre, and director Amber Paige McGinnis, double down on Vogel’s intention in their casting choices. Wallace, a mature African-American actor, plays the racist Big Papa as well as the shy schoolboy who wants to dance with Li’l Bit. It is a little bit startling to hear a furious Li’l Bit threaten Wallace as her grandfather with a vision of Heaven in which God is a black woman and excoriating him for voting for George Wallace, but the audience got it on the night I attended, and laughed as freely as if the role had been played by a white actor.
Similarly, Ralston, a young woman, plays Li’l Bit’s grandmother, realistically but unfussily. She brings her voice to alto range (later, when she provides the voice of a child, her voice goes up two octaves) and adopts a somewhat bowlegged walk, as someone who had spent her life hauling things might. In another play, this might simply be a bit of virtuoso acting; here, it is in service to the point, which is that our sexual pathology is not the property of women born in the 1920s, but is passed down from generation to generation.
It would be an error, I think, to locate this play in the late 1990s, when it was written. It’s tempting to think that a character like Big Papa is a man of the past — that we are now woke, and better than that. But I hear that there are reality-show celebrities who brag that they can “grab women by the pussy” whenever they want. I hear there are fatherly old actors who slip drugs into women’s drinks so they can have sex with their comatose bodies. I hear that high schools are still pits of sexual misery, and that adults don’t know how to help. I hear that nobody’s learned how to drive yet.
How I Learned to Drive by Paula Vogel, directed by Amber Paige McGinnis, assisted by Erika Noelle Williams. Featuring Alyssa Wilmoth Keegan, Peter O’Connor, Emily Townley, Daven Ralston and Craig Wallace . Scenic design by Paige Hathaway . Lighting design by Colin K. Bills . Costume design by Ivania Stack . Sound design by Amy Altadonna . Production design by Jared Mezzocchi . Kasey Hendricks is the props master . Cliff Williams III is the intimacy choreographer . Gabrielle Hoyt is the dramaturg . Che Wernsman is the resident stage manager . Produced by Round House Theatre . Reviewed by Tim Treanor.
The post Review: How I Learned to Drive. Round House production shows why it won Vogel the Pulitzer Prize appeared first on DC Theatre Scene.