BWW Reviews: HOW I LEARNED TO DRIVE - a Disjointed Love Story

The story itself begins to unfold as two people sit side by side in an imagined car. Not looking at one another at first, but they begin to interact intimately. It isn't until Liz Angle, as Li'l Bit, halts the physicality that Edric Johnson, as her Uncle Peck, will actually make eye contact.

It is here in Madison Theatre Guild's production of How I Learned to Drive that the discomfort begins.

Paula Vogel's award winning drama is placed as any other homegrown theatre would be - in a downhome country town with an all-American family. The playful pastels of the middle of the twentieth century, as chosen by costume designer Marie Schulte, sashay across the stage to hide the perverted pink elephant in the room. A perversion hidden beneath the guise of overly protective father figure Uncle Peck only eludes the audience for a short time.

Audiences are brought back to the 1960's, when a young woman nicknamed Li'l Bit is just learning to drive. Her quirky family making inappropriate jokes only adds to her discomfort in being an adolescent. These jokes, however, very quickly become a frightening reality for the young woman. With nothing else to turn to, Li'l Bit finds comfort in her drives - with Uncle Peck.

Angle guides her listeners on a journey that has been disjointed by the damage. Her story does not follow any type of linear path, but unveils pertinent information as needed. Angle's passionate performance grows more heartbreaking in each passing moment. Even in scenes with which there is great joy for her as Li'l Bit, there is always a lurking discomfort over the stage.

Part of this inherent anxiety comes from director Suzan Kurry's leaving the other actors on stage throughout the

show. Though the other members of the cast, Bryan Royston, Carrie Sweet, and Heather Jane Farr, are chorus members, the multiple roles they play harbor some of the judgment cast onto Li'l Bit in her teen years. Whether playing her mother, Aunt Mary, or teasing classmates, Sweet's presence creates a lingering distress that the family is well aware of what is going on but chooses to remain in the background.

By leaving everyone onstage there is this nagging by-stander motif. Someone could help this poor young woman and end the show well before its 90 minute mark...but that would change the point of the show.

Johnson's calculating Uncle Peck is only partially the villain. One would like to believe that human beings are not born to think the way Uncle Peck does. This is the point Vogel's play makes strongly over and over in the course of Li'l Bit's round-a-bout storytelling. Johnson too, with his moments of genuine love, shows that his character has lost his way. He only knows what he wants. He lacks the ability to deny it.

How I Learned to Drive is gently named. It implies a nostalgic story of one's youth - a time of innocence and joy. What it achieves, this time around through the work of MTG, is an hour and a half of inescapable, gut wrenching truth - particularly since that truth is staring at you from the rear view mirror.

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