How I Learned to Drive by Paula Vogel

First published: 1997

First produced: 1997, at the Vineyard Theatre, New York City

Type of plot: Coming of age; memory play

Time of work: 1969-1997

Locale: Suburban Maryland

Principal Characters:

• Li’l Bit, a woman who narrates her memories of her relationship with an uncle
• Peck, her uncle by marriage
• Male Greek Chorus, in the roles of grandfather, waiter, and high school boys
• Female Greek Chorus, in the roles of mother, Aunt Mary, and high school girls
• Teenage Greek Chorus, in the roles of grandmother, high school girls, and the voice of eleven-year-old Li’l Bit

The Play

How I Learned to Drive uses a series of nonlinear scenes from the memory of Li’l Bit, who reveals her complex emotional and sexual relationship with her Uncle Peck. The scenes jump instantaneously back and forth in time on a neutral stage with minimal props. Li’l Bit is portrayed at various ages.

A one-act play, How I Learned to Drive begins with a disembodied voice saying “Safety First—You and Driver Education.” This technique is used throughout the play to indicate how and where each scene is located within the overall narrative. On a bare stage with only two chairs representing a Buick Riviera, Li’l Bit takes her place, in the present, speaking directly to the audience. She describes suburban Maryland in 1969 “before the malls took over.” A young Li’l Bit then steps into the scene, now seventeen years old. She is sitting in a parked car on a summer night with an older, married man—her Uncle Peck. In what appears to be a not completely unpleasant experience, Peck fondles and kisses Li’l Bit’s breasts.

Members of the Greek Chorus assume their roles as Li’l Bit’s relatives at a typical family dinner, which consists of vulgar jokes and crude comments about Li’l Bit’s well-endowed figure. A protective and gentle Uncle Peck shields Li’l Bit from the insults. The scene ends with Li’l Bit bartering a secret, late-night rendezvous with Peck in exchange for the keys to his car.

Li’l Bit informs the audience that, despite the many rumors as to why she was expelled from college, the real reason was most likely her excessive drinking and late-night road trips. Driving intoxicated on the Maryland beltway, she never received a ticket. Uncle Peck, she tells the audience, taught her well.

The action jumps backward to when Li’l Bit is sixteen and has just earned her driver’s license and Peck brings her to an elegant inn to celebrate. Peck has Li’l Bit served several cocktails. As Li’l Bit becomes increasingly intoxicated, the Female Greek Chorus comes forward in the role of mother to deliver a guide to “social drinking” while getting quite drunk herself. Dinner ends, and Peck carries the drunken and dizzy Li’l Bit back to the car. She flirts, then shies away from Peck, finally passionately kissing him in a moment of drunken confusion. Li’l Bit then expresses worry that what they are doing is wrong and will cause harm. Peck convinces her that the relationship will not progress until she wants it to, confident in the expectation that at some point in the future Li’l Bit will want to fully consummate the affair. The scene ends with Li’l Bit passed out in the seat beside Peck.

Peck takes little Cousin Bobby fishing. During the fishing lesson Peck employs his strategies of deception and seduction on the young boy. A sexual encounter between the two is implied.

A revealing dialogue among Li’l Bit, her mother, and her grandmother follows. Li’l Bit is “instructed” in the nature of sex from her elders’ point of view, which is crude, vulgar, and devoid of romance.

Li’l Bit steps out of the past and describes her seduction of a young man she meets on a bus ride in 1979. In this seduction Li’l Bit thinks of Uncle Peck and for the first time understands the allure that seducing children has for Peck.

As Peck instructs Li’l Bit in a driving lesson, erotic photographs of young women and cars flash upstage. Though Li’l Bit nervously flirts with Peck, he is all business, intent on teaching Li’l Bit to drive with confidence and aggression.

An adolescent Li’l Bit is featured in the next several scenes, which take place in ninth grade. Painfully self-conscious of her maturing figure, Li’l Bit is the target of jokes and tricks played on her by classmates.

“The photo shoot” scene takes place one year earlier in Peck’s basement. The shoot begins in a tense, businesslike manner. Yet as Li’l Bit relaxes, her poses become more erotic and seductive. Peck unbuttons her blouse and arranges each shot in ever more sexually explicit poses. Peck reveals that he intends to submit the photographs to Playboy when Li’l Bit turns eighteen. She becomes upset, but Peck assures her that if she wishes, the photos will always remain a secret between them. The scene ends as Li’l Bit, reassured, begins to unbutton and open her blouse and the shooting resumes.

Aunt Mary reveals to the audience that she is aware, at least to some degree, of the relationship between Peck and Li’l Bit. Ironically she defends her husband and places the blame on the young girl.

The action jumps back in time to Li’l Bit’s thirteenth Christmas. As she watches Peck cleaning the dinner dishes, they arrange to meet secretly every week to “talk.” Peck explains that his heavy drinking is the result of his loneliness and passionate nature. Peck encourages Li’l Bit in the belief that only she can help him.

The Greek Chorus comes forward to read the notes Peck has sent to Li’l Bit while she is away at college. As the notes become more desperate, it is clear that Li’l Bit has not responded to his gifts and cards. Though she has asked him not to, Peck travels to Philadelphia to visit Li’l Bit for her eighteenth birthday. Li’l Bit explains to Peck that she is failing her courses. She is confused and conflicted and tells him that their relationship must end. Desperately he begs Li’l Bit to lie down on the bed with him and allow him to hold her. She lies down reluctantly and nearly gives in to his desperate attempt at seduction. Peck offers her a ring, asking her to marry him. This proposal is more than she can handle. She tells him good-bye, never to see him again.

She tells the audience that over the next seven years Peck descended into alcoholism, lost his job and his wife, and, finally, even lost his driver’s license. He died in a drunken fall down the basement steps.

The play ends with Li’l Bit’s very first driving lesson. She is eleven years old and steers the car while sitting on Uncle Peck’s lap. She takes the wheel in both hands, leaving Peck free to fondle her breasts and press himself into her. The scene ends with his orgasmic moans.

In her final monologue Li’l Bit explains that at the age of thirty-five, and with the passage of time, she has come to understand, and perhaps even forgive, Uncle Peck.

Dramatic Devices

How I Learned to Drive is staged in a style that is both presentational (includes the audience) and representational (excludes the audience). At times characters narrate action directly to the audience while other scenes are presented in almost cinematic realism. Told in a series of nonchronological cross-cuts, the actions of Li’l Bit, Uncle Peck, and the family are examined over a period of several years. This blurring of temporal chronology allows the audience to see into the deliberations and consequences of the characters’ actions in a unique way. The play is a memory told in a series of flashbacks and flash-forwards. The audience sees the end of Li’l Bit’s relationship with Uncle Peck before it has even begun. The audience also sees the effects of the abuse before they see the cause.

The title of the play derives from its main action: the driving lessons Uncle Peck gives to Li’l Bit. The lessons become a metaphor for two of the major rites of passage for American youth: earning one’s driver’s license as well as sexual initiation, an event that often occurs in a car. This metaphor is supported through the use of phrases and terminology from driving manuals. Images of traffic signs are seen and heard to guide Li’l Bit’s navigation on the road of life. They also help her find her way through the sexual landscape of her relationship with Peck.

Complicating the presentation of the play is the use of a modern Greek chorus of three actors who perform the roles of several characters. They also help to frame the narrative by appearing as neutral characters spaced throughout the playing area and reciting the phrases from driving lectures and manuals, which allude to the time, place, or emotional tone of each scene. The Teenage Greek Chorus is used to fragment Li’l Bit’s character. In one of the most disturbing scenes of the play, the Teenage Greek Chorus steps into the role of eleven-year-old Li’l Bit. Peck fondles her breasts and presses himself into her as the older Li’l Bit looks on and comments to the audience.

Humor is used as a device to further complicate the story and mediate the disturbing nature of the subject of the play. The humor helps the audience to disengage or step back from the action in order to contemplate the themes from a less emotional stance.

Music and advertising images from the 1960’s are used to accentuate the sexualization of young girls and reinforce the theme of pedophilia. The “you’re sixteen” genre hits, such as Gary Puckett and the Union Gap’s “This Girl Is a Woman Now,” support the sexualization-of-girls theme. Li’l Bit herself is further eroticized through the use of images projected on a screen upstage during the photo shoot scene.

Critical Context

In 1998, when it was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, How I Learned to Drive was one of the most often produced play in the United States. It is typical of Vogel’s work in that, like most of her other plays, it deals with issues concerning families, domestic violence, and abuse. Vogel’s plays often explore taboo subjects in startling new ways. The Baltimore Waltz (pb. 1996) deals with a brother’s death from acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS). Hot ’n’ Throbbing (pr. 1993, pb. 1996) presents themes concerning female pornography and domestic violence. Vogel often uses comedy and seemingly inappropriate moments of humor to dismantle her audiences’ protective emotional shells.

Vogel’s treatment of social issues often centers on the family in its social context. Her characters are complex and multidimensional, with complicated feelings and problems.

Often Vogel’s female characters are presented as desiring, rather than desirable, subjects. Desdemona: A Play About a Handkerchief (pr. 1993, pb. 1994) explores the secret lives and sexual desires of the women in Shakespearean tragedy. In an ironic turnabout, male characters in Vogel’s plays often become the objects of the desirous female gaze.

Sources for Further Study

Guare, John, ed. Conjunctions 25: The New American Theatre. Annandale-On-Hudson, N.Y.: Bard College, 1995.

Mead, Rebecca. “Drive-by Shooting.” New York 30 (April 7, 1997): 46-47.

Savran, David. The Playwright’s Voice: American Dramatists on Memory, Writing, and the Politics of Culture. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1999.

Scanlan, Dick. “Say Uncle.” Advocate, June 10, 1997, 61-63.