Sequestered in the sound booth, the playwright Paula Vogel wept her way through an entire box of tissues. It was 1997 and the last time she would get to see Mary-Louise Parker and David Morse perform their starring roles Off Broadway in “How I Learned to Drive,” the memory play that won Obie Awards for all three of them and their director, Mark Brokaw, as well as a Pulitzer Prize for Vogel.
“Now, I am grateful to any actor who ever does any role in my plays,” she said over a late January lunch in Providence, where she taught for years at Brown University, and where she and her wife still keep a part-time home. “But I really imprinted on this first cast.”
A critically lauded downtown hit at the Vineyard Theater that transferred across the street for a commercial run, “How I Learned to Drive” arrives on Broadway for the first time this spring, starting previews on March 27 at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater.
Directed once more by Brokaw, the Manhattan Theater Club production reunites Parker as Li’l Bit with Morse as Peck, her charming uncle, who sexually abuses her throughout her childhood and adolescence. As recalled by the grown-up Li’l Bit, Peck is as methodical a predator as he is a driving instructor. In the play’s reverse chronology, the audience sees the girl get younger and younger.
By all accounts, the experience on that original production was so extraordinary that the principals long ago started musing about a reprise. In the meantime, Parker starred in “Weeds” on Showtime, Brokaw directed her twice on Broadway, Morse went there with “The Seafarer” and “The Iceman Cometh,” and Vogel made it to Broadway herself for the first time just three years ago, with “Indecent.”
In separate interviews, the four collaborators spoke recently about the history of “How I Learned to Drive,” evolving awareness of sexual trauma and, for Vogel’s part, why she used to say publicly that the story wasn’t inspired by her own life. These are edited excerpts.
The writing: ‘A promise to my mother’
PAULA VOGEL The way it came about was a complete fluke. I had this idea for a play. Cherry Jones was going to come with me to Alaska. I wanted her to play a young Farinelli. Week before, Cherry calls me and says, “Paula, I don’t know what to do. I went for an audition. I never thought I’d get it, but I got it.” She said, “It’s ‘The Heiress.’” I said, “You’ve gotta take that. You can’t go to Alaska.”
I was so freaked out I didn’t tell the theater company. I got off the plane in Alaska and they said, “Where’s Cherry?” I said, “OK, some good news and some bad news. First the bad news. Cherry is playing ‘The Heiress.’ Now the good news. I have this play about —” And I think to the artistic director I said, “about my uncle.” I wrote it in Juneau in about two weeks, staying up all night.
MARK BROKAW When you hear what the play is about, the last thing you would think is that there’s laughs in it. But Paula was so wise to lure the audience in. And the way that she spaces out the events of the play — you know, she saves till the very end what is really the gut-punch, and by that time you’re ready to receive it.
VOGEL I became obsessed with “Lolita” in college and grad school. I was fascinated by the empathy for Humbert Humbert. I was fascinated by the look at Lolita as a peer to Humbert Humbert. I had already thought when I was 23 or 24, “I don’t know how you would do this as a play” — my story as a play. I became extremely obsessed, I still am, with the notion of negative empathy.
DAVID MORSE I was offered a movie, a very classy movie from a great novel, and the character in it was a father who molests his daughter. I thought, “I can’t do this.” Then I was asked, just out of the blue, to come to the Vineyard Theater. Reading the play, it’s an uncle and his niece, and along the same lines of the movie. But the tone of it was so different. There have been women in my life who have experienced things like this. So it felt important to be able to tell this story, because of the way it was told.
VOGEL Three things that I want to talk about. One was a promise to my mother, who read it. To say that her health was fragile is putting it mildly. She asked that I not say that it was autobiographical. The other thing is that whenever women write autobiographically, we are told that we are confessional. No one says that about Sam Shepard, or David Mamet, or Eugene O’Neill.
Third thing was there’s a myth, and it’s I think a very perilous myth, that the reason that women become lesbians is because of sexual trauma, a fear and a hatred of men. The last thing I’m going to do is get put into that category. Now I’m 68, man; I’m in the grandmother category. So say whatever you will.
MARY-LOUISE PARKER They sent it to me and I read it. It took a few times. I went and asked if I could read it aloud. I wasn’t sure if I was too young at the time, which is so ironic because now I’m a little too old, but the second I went to read it out loud, I just felt, I can’t wait to do this. It was a scene where she’s 13. There are certain ages that are just viscerally so available to me because the memories are so strong, you know? Something about being a 13-year-old girl, an 11-year-old girl.
VOGEL I had written the play where Li’l Bit was going to be my age, 45. It was something about Mary-Louise and her ability, in the blink of an eye, to shape-change, where I thought, “That’s it. Age is amorphous. You always think you’re in high school. I don’t care how old you are.”
The reaction: ‘People were rattled’
BROKAW I remember the first few audiences especially. There’s a scene where she’s with an older man who’s trying to convince her to neck, as well as a few other things, in the front seat of a car.
VOGEL We wanted it to feel like two people who are very attractive, feeling that eroticism on a summer night, until the very last moment, where she says, “Uncle Peck.”
BROKAW I just remember the audience gasping at that moment, because there was no thought in anybody’s head that it was a relative.
VOGEL I think we wanted to pull the rug out. People didn’t even talk at that point about saying to people, “This may cause a trigger.” That wasn’t on anybody’s mind.
PARKER Reactions after that play were really, really strong, in a way that a handful of times in my life I’ve seen. People were rattled.
VOGEL One of the things I heard was the men saying, “Huh. I’d have some difficulties if she were my niece.” And I heard women in the audience go, “If he were my uncle….” And then there was the other response, of people coming forward and saying, “May I talk?” Three out of 10, four out of 10, may be the percentage. I never knew that I’d write a play with that great an audience concurrence.
MORSE The numbers of people who couldn’t leave after the show because they needed company — people who would just be in tears out there. But I think the thing that people were surprised by, and it’s what I responded to, was the affection you have for that man, because of the way Paula wrote it, her compassion. It’s not what you expect when you see a story about a pedophile or sexual abuser.
VOGEL The thing that David gave me that was so important — I mean, Mary-Louise gave me a clarity — David gave me the ability to feel love. Which will make a lot of people very angry. Which is, sometimes good people do terrible things. Sometimes people have illnesses. I don’t forgive him [the person Peck is based on], but I feel a sympathy, a sorrow, because of David.
Coming back: ‘Trauma is public now’
VOGEL The fact that I got the Pulitzer, even though it never went to Broadway, meant that within a year, I had 20 productions regionally in places that I’d never been in. And then it got taught in college classes. Really, it’s an out-of-body experience. It meant that the play that you carry inside you for 30 years will be a little more visible.
MORSE We got together in December for a couple days and talked about doing it together, and the passage of time and how the world has changed and how we’ve changed. All of that is going to be a part of this.
PARKER There are conceptual things that I’m wanting to go after, things that I never felt I cracked before. I have a daughter now, too. I’m really, really interested to hear what she’s going to say, because she’s 13.
MORSE Is there going to be a different feeling about Peck? I don’t know.
BROKAW Trauma is public now and not hidden away, in a way that it was before. There’s so much out there now about these deeply damaging relationships that are caused by behavior inflicted by trusted authority figures, able to continue for so long because there was a network of people that were enabling them. In this story, that’s true also. I look at that very, very differently.
VOGEL I didn’t go into this concerned with the forgiveness of that person [Peck is based on]. I went into this concerned with the forgiveness of myself. Because the truth is the children always feel culpable.
And the structure of this is me getting to a point where I’m like, “You know what? You were a kid.” That’s all I wanted, to get there and feel that. And have it be such a basic truth that my childhood self would accept it.
PARKER There was a picture of me and David on the cover of The Village Voice back then. It was this really moody picture, and it said, “Theater Too Tough for Uptown.” And that was kind of true. Now we’re doing it. It’s much riskier than when we did it before, because of the conversations that people are having and how everything is quite polarized.
BROKAW It’s kind of crazy this play’s never been done on Broadway. I feel really lucky to be able to bring this great piece of work to be seen and taken seriously in a way it should be. When something happens on Broadway, there’s a certain stamp that gets applied to it. And I think the play deserves that.
Source: Theater - nytimes.com
