Driving lessons

A disturbing but flawed Vogel drama

by Robert von Stein Redick

How I Learned to Drive plays through November 5 at the Theater Project in Brunswick. Call (207) 729-8584.

DRIVE BY: Wendy Poole and Al Miller in How I Learned To Drive.

What if Atticus Finch wasn't the perfect father he seems? What if he drank? What if his loving relationship with his daughter grew into something that would keep To Kill a Mockingbird

off seventh-grade readings lists well into the 21st century?

Paula Vogel insists that How I Learned to Drive was inspired by Lolita, not Mockingbird, and her play certainly shares one trait — quasi-incestuous pedophilia — with Nabokov's demonic masterpiece. But the comparison ends right there. Lolita is a mad pageant about a European sophisticate destroyed by his encounter with America's pubescent allures, told in a language that chuckles and weeps at its own excesses. Drive is a memory play, delivered in wistful undertones. Lolita, moreover, is a tale told by an abuser. Vogel's play lets the once-abused child paint the scenes.

Hints of Mockingbird, on the other hand, are dabbed all over Drive, from the rural Southern setting to the exclusivity of the older man/young girl relationship. Then there's the name: a coincidence, surely, that the somber Uncle Peck of Vogel's play, who chases his niece with blatant intent even as he teaches her to drive, should bear the same name as the most famous interpreter of Atticus Finch? I assumed as much, and banished Gregory Peck from my mind. Until, that is, I read Vogel's own casting notes. In these she suggests that the pedophile-uncle be played "by an actor one might cast in the role of Atticus Finch."

Uncomfortable? That's the idea. For nothing is more essential to this Pulitzer Prize-winning play, which opened last Thursday at the Theater Project in Brunswick, than that we understand the child molester's good points. Vogel is at pains to reveal the tenderness of Uncle Peck (Al Miller) from the start, when over the dinner table he tries to shield his niece from the "dog-ugly meanness" of her cracker grandfather and the jibes of her mother and grandmother, for whom the 14-year-old's expanding bustline is an irresistible target. In this arena no one has more trouble resisting than Peck himself: we have already encountered him and "L'il Bit" (Wendy Poole) seated in widely separated chairs representing his '65 Chevy, miming a scene of very heavy petting without so much as a glance at one another.

LaBute’s Bash Neil LaBute's Bash isn’t light fare, but it’s nourishing. In each of its three one-act plays a character confesses to some horrific crime. It isn’t easy to stomach at times, but it is compelling, and there is much visceral pleasure to be found in the rough texture of LaBute’s well-honed words, the brutality and poignancy of his imagery, the expressiveness of the actors’ pauses and intimate gestures. This event, presented by the homeless Mad Horse Theater Company to a small invited audience in a South Portland living room, demonstrates that when it comes to serious theater less can be more. This is gut-wrenching theater pared down to bare essentials. In “Iphigenia in Orem” actor J. D. Merritt seems at once sinister and pathetic as he confesses the murder of his infant daughter to an off-stage stranger he has just met in a bar. Merritt resembles a sort of dissipated Satan, squinting out from under dark eyebrows, hair combed back into the vaguest suggestion of devil’s horns, describing the “little mound wandering around,” that was his daughter struggling for life under the weight of a heavy comforter. In “A Gaggle of Saints” Guy Durichek’s and Elizabeth Enck’s tanned skin and sparkling eyes radiate both youthful vitality and sadistic malevolence as they describe their great party at the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan. John (Durichek) tells us how his friends viciously beat a homosexual stranger — to death, probably — then met their girlfriends for breakfast, where — still wearing his bloody tuxedo shirt — John presented Sue (Enck) with a gold anniversary ring by dropping it in her water glass. John’s self-deceit is so tangible it practically crawls off the stage and into the laps of the audience; Sue, in contrast, seems quite comfortable with her own sadistic impulses. In “Medea Redux” Christine Louise Marshall is tough and smart as she confesses to murdering her child to a tape recorder and (presumably) an off-stage investigator. Marshal seems at once the helpless victim and the worst kind of calculating murderer, waiting years to get back at the middle-school teacher who seduced her and left her pregnant. Marshall's studied delivery is effective; describing the car her teacher drove she fills even a commonplace word like “Peugeot” with anger and ambivalence. He kissed her for the first time in a parking lot behind “the floor shop”; it's an innocuous phrase but its unexamined familiarity is evocative — and typical of LaBute’s vivid writing. —Jim Austin

Nonetheless, virtuous Peck draws the line on flirtation when it interferes with his deadly serious driving lessons. "You're going to learn to think what the other guy is doing before he does it," he declares, seated beside her in the make-believe Chevy. "If there's an accident, and 10 cars pile up, and people get killed, you're going to be the one who steers through it . . . I don't know how long you or I are going to live, but we're for damned sure not going to die in a car."

Without such earnest scenes, Drive would not be worth even a theatrical footnote, for they make it, grimly and undeniably, a love story. After all, children are molested not only because they are physically weak. They are also caught in nets of lies, guilt, and confused affection — nets they lack the experience to untangle. This is no great discovery. But Vogel's piece has the bravery to take the next step and explore how the abusers themselves become tangled in these nets. Love may have nothing to do with pedophilia, but alas, the presence of one does not guarantee the other's absence.

The great irony is that Vogel's play clears such high moral and political hurdles only to stumble over every other ripple on the racetrack. The humor she grasps at, from the genital origins of family nicknames to L'il Bit's trials as a large-breasted teen, is simply tired. The women's kitchen-table critique of men's sexual fixation is a great opportunity for homespun wit, but what emerges is as pedestrian as any week's issue of Seventeen. Outside Uncle Peck, the family itself (played by Kurt Ela, Michele Livermore Wigton, and Katie Lippa) has no reality at all beyond its sex and booze wisecracks. But the bitterest pill is the lumbering, overheated metaphor of driving as initiation rite. Snapshots of traffic signs flash on a screen over the actors' heads: "Do Not Enter," "Yield," "Slow – Children." Time shifts are announced in phrases seemingly lifted from a driver's education manual: "You and the Reverse Gear" introduces a flashback; "Shifting Forward From Second to Third" means — you guessed it — a heightening of tension. And wouldn't you know — suave old Peck romanticizes his Chevy just the way he does little children.

Clichés aside, a pedophile with a soft caramel heart is no easy role. As he did when directing the far better Pentecost, Al Miller rises to the challenge. His brandy-smooth voice and still, solid presence are comforting, disarming even. We believe, to our great dismay, in his ability to charm. Unfortunately there is somewhat more poise than passion on display: in his final moment with L'il Bit, when his indecent proposal literally threatens to shatter their family, his mood of kindly condescension hardly varies.

Stasis of another kind haunts Poole's performance. In contrast to the searching rhythms of the author's language, L'il Bit's memories of childhood tumble from her mouth at a single allegro pace, fixed as if by a metronome. Gone is the killer pause, the deliberately drawn-out syllables, that made her Yasmin so mesmerizing in Pentecost.

We are left with a strong but imperfect take on one of the most disturbing relationships in modern theater, surrounded by a halo of underpowered gimmickry. Pulitzer judges notwithstanding, it is hard to imagine a production altogether free of such troubles. Drive is radically asymmetrical; Vogel is like a juggler who can do wonders with knives or torches, but drops the simple rubber balls left, right, and center.

Robert von Stein Redick can be reached at robvsredick@earthlink.net.