How I Learned to Drive

Paula Vogel wrote the play, How I Learned to Drive, by staying up all night for two weeks. She had secured a theater residency in Juneau, but unforeseen circumstances caused her to arrive empty handed. As a result, she was highly aware of an obligation to produce something quickly. The long days of sunlight, the absence of distractions to be had in Juneau and her solitude all helped to get the job done.

The play explores the complicated relationship between a socially isolated pre-pubescent girl, L’il Bit, and her uncle, Peck. Written with a postmodern hand that deconstructs and rearranges both time and characters, the narrative thread is still direct, frank and painful. It is also a play that is empathetic and, unexpectedly, very funny. Vogel reels you into the story, told in fragments, then saves the strongest hit until the very end when you have become a bit more prepared for its harsh truth.

It is as if How I Learned to Drive just gushed itself into existence during those two weeks in Alaska.

The play was first performed Off Broadway in 1997. Many said it was ahead of its time. (The Village Voice featured the two stars of that first production, Mary-Louise Parker and David Morse, on its cover with the headline, “Theater Too Tough for Uptown.”) The next year the Monica Lewinsky scandal went public, and How I Learned to Drive won the Pulitzer Prize. A few years later, Betrayal: The Crisis in the Catholic Church–the basis for the Oscar winning film Spotlight–was published by the investigative staff of the Boston Globe, also winning a Pulitzer. And as we all now know, the next 20 years brought a steady stream of revelations and exposures that reached a global tipping point when the 2006 #MeToo movement went viral in 2017.

Perhaps more than being ahead of its time, How I Learned to Drive was the harbinger of this tsunami of exposure about the sexual abuse of women, many of them children. In the words of Helen Shaw, if the play no longer seems groundbreaking it’s because How I Learned to Drive was “groundtilling.” A bumper crop of books, plays, films and commentaries have emerged from its soil.

Part of the play’s power is that it is not a simple story of victim and predator. L’il Bit and Peck have a complex relationship, and the play offers some understanding for a man who is, in fact, a child molester. Vogel has frequently referenced how influenced she was by reading Nabokov’s Lolita, exploring the “negative sympathy” she had for Humbert Humbert. She intended her own play to “get the audience to go along for a ride they wouldn’t ordinarily take, or don’t even know they’re taking.” Nothing is as it seems, and Vogel’s artistry in assembling a complexity of emotions is fundamental to the 30 year staying power of How I Learned to Drive. It still packs a gut punch in 2023.

Actors’ Shakespeare Project, one of Boston’s most compelling theater companies (my review of their recent production of Taming of the Shrew is here) is currently staging the play at the Roberts Studio Theater at the Calderwood Pavilion. Directed by Elaine Vaan Hogue and starring Jennifer Rohn and Dennis Trainor Jr, along with Amy Griffin, Sarah Newhouse and Tommy Vines, this production is a “not to be missed” opportunity for Boston audiences to experience Vogel’s moving, minimalist, starkly honest play. It is so well done.

In her directorial commentary, Vaan Hogue references Sarah Polley’s recent memoir, Run Towards the Danger. (Personal note: This was one of the best books I read in 2023. I recommend it highly.) In her book, Polley–a gifted actor, director and writer–addresses her own encounters with sexual abuse and trauma. She willingly shares “the most dangerous stories of my life. The ones I have avoided, the ones I haven’t told, the ones that have kept me awake on countless nights.”

It wasn’t until several years after How I Learned to Drive was written that Vogel acknowledged that the story in the play was based on her own life. (Vogel’s mother had asked her to not say that it was autobiographical, so she had demurred to that request.) “Whenever women write autobiographically, we are told that we are confessional,” Vogel said. “No one says that about Sam Shepard, or David Mamet, or Eugene O’Neill.” For both Polley and Vogel, story sharing comes from a position of candor and strength. They bravely confront things people have been told to keep hidden, then they describe them as they really are.

Vogel continues:

“I didn’t go into this concerned with the forgiveness of that person [Peck is based on]. I went into this concerned with the forgiveness of myself. Because the truth is the children always feel culpable. And the structure of this is me getting to a point where I’m like, ‘You know what? You were a kid.’ That’s all I wanted, to get there and feel that. And have it be such a basic truth that my childhood self would accept it.”

Trauma is an increasing public concern. It is deep, complex and pervasive. As we come to know more about it and the damage it incurs, the social practices that obfuscate and bury the difficult stories are being broken down slowly. It is the deft hand of writers like Vogel and directors like Vaan Hogue that brings nuance, sensitivity and candidness to theatrical portrayals of these difficult realities.

How I Learned to Drive runs through November 25.