Imagine an after-school special in which the parents teach their child about pedophilia instead of the birds and the bees. In the Pulitzer-Prize-winning play How I Learned to Drive, the teenage protagonist lives in a house where sex is tableside chitchat. When “Li’l Bit” — named after her genitalia — innocently asks her grandmother if sex hurts, the old woman replies matter-of-factly: “You lie there like a stuck pig. It’s agony — especially if you do it before marriage.”
Directed by senior Catherine Miller, Paula Vogel’s unforgettable play will be showing at Little Theater this weekend. It chronicles Li’l Bit’s incestuous relationship with her uncle, four times her age.
Surrounded by crude adults who endlessly laugh at her budding sexuality, the girl turns to her more sophisticated Uncle Peck, played by senior Nathan Edmondson, for companionship. He is the only person who pays attention to her, and he promises to teach her how to drive. But during their first driving lesson, his hands start creeping up her chest as she steers the wheel. Soon the two are meeting for weekly “lessons.”
Unlike most tales of abuse, How I Learned to Drive has a silver lining. According to Miller, “It is about the gifts that those who harm us most can bestow on us. It looks at the good that can arise from abuse.”
The power of the play lies in its contradictions. Uncle Peck is not the typical child abuser. Before touching his niece, he always asks her “Are you sure you want me to?” He tells her to use her intelligence — “the fire in [her] mind” — to rise above her background. As fellow sufferers, the two have a genuine emotional connection. But L’il Bit can never forgive her uncle for destroying her innocence.
Miller and her cast breathe life into Vogel’s sharp and often hilarious dialogue. Senior Samantha Tunis, who collaborated with Miller in the production, is perfect in the lead role. She is relaxed in front of the audience and narrates her harrowing story in an engaging manner without ever slipping into self-pity. The four other actors (three of whom take double roles) are equally convincing: Edmondson as Uncle Peck, sophomore Leah Christie as Li’l Bit’s mother and aunt, senior Aaron Welch as her grandfather and boyfriend and first-year Olivia Briggs as her grandmother and a teenage bully.
The narration, which skips back and forth between Li’l Bit’s childhood and adulthood, is natural and direct. Characters speak to the audience as if they are divulging bits of juicy gossip to a friend. The humorous tone of the play contrasts with the serious subject matter.
Miller said the play’s strength is exactly this tension between comedy and tragedy. “What makes it so poignant is the fact that we have been laughing at it, when in the end we realize, it is nothing to laugh about.”