Dan Myers
How I Learned to Drive, the Pulitzer Prize-winning work by Paula Vogel, is a heartbreaking memory play following the tumultuous pre-teen and teen years of the main character, Li'l Bit.
In the solid Madison Theatre Guild production directed by Suzan Curry at the Bartell Theater, Liz Angle imbues the character of Li'l Bit with painful clarity. She shares vignettes of growing up in a poor, Southern family, while a narrator intersperses her memories with instructions from a driver's education manual. Scenes from her past lurch forward, idle in neutral or get stuck in reverse, as she shares key moments that shaped her damaged and uneasy present.
Alternately funny and tragic, the play explores Li'l Bit's understanding of family, sex, love and gender roles; the changes in her body as she "blossoms" through adolescence; the power of alcohol to soothe pain and destroy lives; and most importantly, her impossibly complicated relationship with her favorite relative, Uncle Peck (Edric Johnson).
The two main characters, Li'l Bit and Uncle Peck (nicknamed, like the rest of the family, based on their genitalia) are joined onstage by three members of a Greek Chorus who fill in all the other roles in the story, from grandparents to waiters to awkward teens at a school dance (Bryan Royston, Carrie Sweet and Heather Jane Farr). Always present onstage, the trio helps the play transition from one moment to the next, arranging basic set pieces and props on the simple platform stage. The beautifully rendered set, designed by Nathan Stuber, uses a multitude of black and gray street signs to outline a similarly monochromatic mural of a country road in rural Maryland, where Li'l Bit feels, by turns, the most lost and the most in control, as she learns to drive in Uncle Peck's car.
In the abstract, a play about the long, calculated emotional and sexual abuse of a young girl by the one adult in her life who offers her real love and support sounds abhorrent. The brilliance of this story is in its complexity -- which Angle and Johnson capture through subtle and emotionally vulnerable performances. Both actors find important moments when their characters seem to be acting on the best intentions that, of course, have the most catastrophic results.
The ride is fascinating, but on opening night, the production seemed to lack energy and intention -- so much so that it was actually difficult to hear the actors much of the time in the small Evjue space. Many scenes were moving, but the overall shape of the play felt a little lost. The production would benefit from more urgency and a clearer reason for taking the journey.
