With unsentimental candor and a vestigial Maryland accent, Li’l Bit sets the first scene: “It's 1969. Parker puts her gift for playing smart, broken women to powerful use as our narrator, known as Li’l Bit.
Because it is a Glass Menagerie –style memory play, the ages of the principal actors don’t really matter.
The subject of Vogel’s Pulitzer Prize–winning drama is childhood sexual abuse, and although it treats this question with complexity and tact-there is nothing exploitive about it-it gives you a cumulative sense of the creeps. That is not to say that How I Learned to Drive is ever quite a comfortable experience. After more than a quarter of a century, they all move assuredly in old roles as the play shifts back into gear. With a firm eye on the rearview mirror, this production reunites director Mark Brokaw, who helmed the show’s premiere at the Vineyard in 1997, with its two extraordinary original stars, Mary-Louise Parker and David Morse also along for the ride is Johanna Day as the principal soloist in the show’s Greek Chorus of three, plus lighting designer Mark McCullough and sound designer David Van Tieghem. Manhattan Theatre Club’s revival of Paula Vogel’s How I Learned to Drive, one of the signal plays of the 1990s, represents an exception. Most good theater lives on, if it’s lucky, only in the memory of those who saw it.
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