Lubed Lolita

Trinity puts Vogel's pedal to the mettle

by Carolyn Clay

HOW I LEARNED TO DRIVE. By Paula Vogel. Directed by Molly D. Smith. Set design by Judy Gailen. Costumes by Marilyn Salvatore. Lighting by Art Rotch. Sound by Ken Burch. With Anne Scurria, Timothy Crowe, Janice Duclos, Dan Welch, and Marta Ann Lastufka. At Trinity Repertory Company, Providence, through June 28.

"The best," according to How I Learned To Drive's Uncle Peck, is a Cadillac Eldorado. But Paula Vogel does not produce that kind of vehicle. Her plays, including the Obie-winning The Baltimore Waltz and Pulitzer-winning How I Learned To Drive, are more like the new Volkswagen Beetle: compact, well engineered, slightly whimsical, and -- since the Pulitzer Prize was announced last month -- in demand. How I Learned To Drive, the Providence playwright's vehicular take on Lolita, is scheduled for some 50 productions in the coming year. Right now, though, it's parked practically in Vogel's driveway, at Trinity Rep, its trunk a Pandora's box stuffed with disturbing ambivalence. True, there's no bumper sticker reading "Honk if you love pedophiles." But Vogel has dared to write a play about a child and a molester that brims with brash compassion. It's acted by Anne Scurria and Timothy Crowe with a mix of tenderness, pain, and folksy charm. And what it leaves in its tracks is a modicum of forgiveness.

There is much about How I Learned To Drive that is provocative and much that is clever. But what is most artful about the play is the way in which it sets the poignant if unacceptable central relationship against a backdrop of caricature, so that Peck and niece Li'l Bit seem the only real people in each other's lives. Theirs is a liaison rooted in mutual loneliness; the pair are surrounded (with few exceptions) by taunting grotesques, including a dysfunctional cracker-barrel clan preoccupied with sex. All these other characters are played by a three-person "Greek chorus" that, rather than intoning in strophe and antistrophe, occasionally drowns out its own bickering by launching into doo-wah harmony -- just as Li'l Bit must have drowned it out by cranking up the radio (ironically, to listen to such mixed messages as "Baby, You Can Drive My Car").

Narrated by the adult Li'l Bit, How I Learned To Drive is a memory play, primarily moving, like Harold Pinter's Betrayal, in reverse. It is also, in the playwright's appellation, a "mammary play." Li'l Bit, wincingly self-conscious but also powerful in her precocious development, has got 'em, and Peck exudes, well, sympathy and lust; a car fancier, he's even fonder of Li'l Bit's headlights than he is of his own. Zipping along the trail of the 1960s, without ever stooping to polemic, Vogel implicates various aspects of pop and Southern culture, along with the emotional needs of the characters, as contributors to the horrible betrayal that irrevocably damages Li'l Bit, even as it forges her.

How I Learned To Drive is also a play about obsession, complicity, and power. Its central irony is that, just as expert driver Peck bequeaths to Li'l Bit control of a car, he coaxes her into a relationship that is out of control from the get-go. Says the adult Li'l Bit, finally reliving the first unforgivable violation of the surrogate father/daughter bond, "That day was the last day I lived in my body. I retreated above the neck, and I've lived inside the `fire' in my head ever since." As for the not-unsympathetic Peck, he has, he tells his niece, "a fire in my heart," the flames of which lick them both.

One thing Vogel deliberately does not do is supply the sort of specifics that would steer her play toward realism. How I Learned To Drive is set in suburban Maryland, but we know Uncle Peck is not from around there. He hails from South Carolina, where he doubtless left some secrets, and he's tight-lipped about the World War II experience that contributed to his depression and drinking. At Trinity, though, Timothy Crowe fleshes Peck out intriguingly, making him less Atticus Finch (as Vogel suggests) than sensitive Southern snake-oil salesman, touchingly geeky as well as glibly seductive. And there is a definite wound at the core of him, a desperation that he contains beneath a friendly manner but that, as it dawns on her, frightens Li'l Bit.

The Trinity mounting is a co-production with Alaska's Perseverance Theatre and is directed by longtime Vogel friend and collaborator Molly D. Smith. Judy Gailen's set seems unnecessarily ugly -- a dirt mound backed by a roiling red sky. But the spare staging brings to provocative, even cheesy, situations an air of ritual. And the stylized performances by the Chorus cause Peck and Li'l Bit to stand out like bas-relief against a cartoon. As the Male Greek Chorus, Dan Welch leans too far in a leering-hillbilly direction, and Teenage Greek Chorus Marta Ann Lastufka, heartbreaking as the voice of 11-year-old Li'l Bit, isn't terribly convincing as Grandma. But Janice Duclos handles her assignments well, including the bravura "A Mother's Guide to Social Drinking" and an understated speech by Peck's wife pointing the finger at Li'l Bit.

Still, the production rests (like whatever is holding up a pretty convincing fake chest) on Anne Scurria's shoulders. Although conceived as a woman in her 40s, Li'l Bit was originated, in the 1997 Off Broadway production, by the decade-younger Mary-Louise Parker. The older, tougher Scurria brings to Li'l Bit's ride down memory lane a rueful sophistication out of which her earlier, awkward innocence bursts like a disarming surprise. What the actress does best is to negotiate the tricky divide between moments when Peck and Li'l Bit's relationship seems almost kosher, the actors being not far apart in age, and those when Li'l Bit's trembling vulnerability alerts us to the truth -- as when, following some absurdly stiff attempts at playing model at a private "photo shoot," the 13-year-old is moved to open her shirt to photographer Peck. Both players may have agreed to this discomforting cat-and-mouse game, but in the end there's no doubt which animal is which.