How I Learned To Drive

How I Learned To Drive
A play in two acts by Paula Vogel
Devanaughn Theatre at the Piano Factory
791 Tremont Street, Boston, MA  02118 (617.247.9777)
February 1 - February 18

How I Learned To Find The Devanaughn Theatre could be the prelude to witnessing your first play there. Just locating the entrance at the edge of a parking lot behind Bob’s Bistro on Columbus Avenue in Boston’s South End is an adventure.

The term ‘theater’ might be a stretch in the case of the Piano Factory, the home of the Devanaughn Theatre. Inside, you can fly a paper airplane from one end of the room to the other. The two rows of audience chairs are practically on top of the spare but effective set. Romanesque arch patterns in the two exposed brick walls rise twenty feet to the ceiling and once could indeed have surrounded an industrial piano enterprise in the early twentieth century.

Watching a play in a space not much larger than a living room can be an intimate experience. Add a generous helping of good acting and a tightly constructed play and the result is powerful. Throw in a theme of sexual abuse and the space becomes downright uncomfortable.

The Devanaughn Theatre’s production of Paula Vogel’s “How I Learned To Drive” is a twisted love story. The play centers around a relationship between a young girl and her uncle, who teaches her to drive. He’s patient, compassionate, and the only one who will listen to this conflicted adolescent. He’s also a predator. He teaches her how to drink and how to make love.

The story repels us as it draws us in. Li’l Bit, insecure, fatherless, growing up in rural Maryland, is vulnerable. She’s growing up in a dysfunctional family, has no friends in school, and becomes fascinated with what she perceives as the calm worldliness of the man who married her aunt. Of this play, Paula Vogel has said, “We receive great love from the people who harm us."

Li’l Bit was eleven years old when she took her first driving lesson with her Uncle Peck. The reenactment of that drive is one of several disturbing scenes in the play. Telling the story at that point as a woman in her late thirties, Li’l Bit said of that day, “It’s the last time I lived in my body.”

The play is set between 1971 and 1978 but jumps around in chronology. It’s sometimes hard to figure out the sequence of events because Li’l Bit tells stories from various points in her adult life and in the next breath the play returns to reenactments of disturbing experiences in her childhood relationship with her uncle.

Photo credit to Devanaughn web site (see below).

The relationship between Li’l Bit and her uncle is as complex as it is wrong. He’s the anchor who grounded her during seven years of a painful adolescence. He’s the man who dragged her into a miserable adulthood, which she may just survive, not only in spite of but possibly because of him.

The play does not in any way justify the Uncle’s pathetic behavior. Alex Zielke as Li’l Bit and Kevin Ashworth as Uncle Peck bring the right quantities of obsession and self-loathing to their characters.

It’s a tribute to Vogel’s writing and the Devanaughn Company’s acting that we feel anything but antipathy for Uncle Peck. She examines the tricky terrain between Li’l Bit’s vulnerability and her complicity in their relationship. Questions about the roles of denial and forgiveness linger long after Li’l Bit has taken her last drive.

Wayne Fritsche, Molly Kimmerling, and Jacquelyn Therieau Stachel serve as Grandpa, Grandma, Auntie and a host of other small parts throughout the play. Under the thoughtfully balanced direction of Dani Duggan, they work seamlessly as characters and a sort of Greek Chorus.

The play mercifully has moments of levity but it rolls to its downhill conclusion with the power of an eighteen-wheeler. We know it’s out of control. We know it’s going to crash. We just don’t know who will survive.

The small venues in Boston continue to offer some of the best values and theater experiences. No matter where you live, Paula Vogel’s “How I Learned To Drive” is worth the trip to the Boston’s South End.

For more about the Devanaughn Theatre http://www.devtheatre.com/