Theatre in Review: How I Learned to Drive (Second Stage)

	Norbert Leo Butz. Photo: Joan Marcus

Even in the current revival-happy climate, in which plays from the mid to late 1990s are seen as fair game for a second look, it's not easy to justify a new production of How I Learned to Drive. The original opened as recently as 1997 and ran for 400 performances before landing on the schedule of practically every regional theatre in the country. One could certainly be forgiven for feeling that it could stay on the shelf for a few more seasons.

As it happens, Second Stage has a very good reason for reviving How I Learned to Drive, and his name is Norbert Leo Butz. As Peck, the nicest, gentlest, most sweetly reasonable pedophile you've ever met, he takes an already complex character and finds a treasure trove of new insights. His predecessors -- David Morse and Cotter Smith, both of the original production -- played Peck as a laid-back, cool-as-a-cucumber sort; seducers by indirection, each patiently waited for their prey to come to them. Butz's Peck takes a totally different tack toward Li'l Bit, his niece and the love of his life. He's warm, solicitous, seemingly the perfect gentleman -- even when plying the adolescent girl with martinis or asking her to expose her breasts. Propriety is his middle name; when she hesitates over one of his casually seductive requests, he tells her, sternly, "Nothing is gonna happen until you want it to." Then, in a voice pathetically shot through with a little boy's hope, he asks, "Do you want something to happen?"

Thus does Peck not only seduce his niece, he also makes her complicit in the act, a fact that will have devastating consequences for Li'l Bit as she tries to make a life for herself outside her confining family circle. He even convinces her that his newly found sobriety depends on remaining in her good graces. Butz's Peck offers such a carefully thought out rationale for everything he does that, at times, you have to remind yourself that you're looking at a criminal. One of How I Learned to Drive's most powerful truths is that the greatest evils are perpetrated by people who are convinced of their own goodness: Peck believes himself to be sincerely in love with Li'l Bit; indeed, Butz subtly conveys how Peck sees himself as the innocent victim of a connection too powerful to be denied. (Little things, like their kinship and age difference, are details to be papered over.) In conversation with Li'l Bit over the kitchen sink, Peck notes that some men have a fire in their bellies and some have it in their head. When Li'l Bit asks about him, his reply contains the sadness of the world: "I have a fire in my heart."

Butz's reading of that line is memorable, but his finest moment comes in one of the play's most telling scenes, recounting Peck's fishing trip with Li'l Bit's cousin Bobby. The boy is unseen -- the scene is a monologue -- but it demonstrates Peck's modus operandi with appalling clarity. When an attempt at teaching him how to fish reduces the young boy to tears -- he doesn't want to kill the pompano he catches -- Peck wins him over with an intoxicating mix of affection, humor, and understanding, establishing a tone of shared confidences before luring him off to visit a secret tree house nearby. One of the most remarkable actors to appear regularly on our stages -- who else is so adept as a character man in both musicals and straight plays? -- Butz captures every one of Peck's many facets -- his charm, his cunning, his kindliness, and the deeply corrosive sadness at his core -- keeping them all in the air at once, like so many juggler's balls.

It takes plenty of skill, and more than a little moxie, to hold your own against such a snake charmer, and, watching Elizabeth Reaser as Li'l Bit, you can tell that she has been away from the stage for a while. There's a certain fidgety quality, a slight skittishness that is apparent throughout. At the same time, her Li'l Bit is an original, both fierce and flirty, her obvious need for a father making her fatally vulnerable to Peck's attentions. (Reaser's more open-hearted approach makes an interesting contrast to that of Mary Louise Parker, the role's creator, who surrounded herself with a carapace of irony, her true feelings only briefly revealed at very end.) She brings a nicely world-weary tone to such lines as "You can image how Maryland used to be before the malls came." And she vividly conveys the awkwardness of an adolescent who is no longer at home in her body, thanks to her newly swelling breasts. Some of her best moments, however, are simple, silent reactions; posing awkwardly, at the age of 13, for a camera wielded by Peck (who explains that Playboy pictorials, for which she is being groomed, are the height of class), she is caught off-guard when, between flashbulbs, he says "I love you." Reaser's head snaps around in astonishment, her face frozen into a deer-in-the-headlights expression. She's clearly not used to hearing these words; we see in an instant that Peck has found a way into Li'l Bit's soul.

It can be easy to forget that How I Learned to Drive isn't a two-character play, but, in Kate Whoriskey's staging, the Greek chorus of three (here played by Kevin Cahoon, Jennifer Regan, and Marnie Schulenberg) is a particularly strong presence, creating a universe of associated family and friends. All three are fine, but Regan gets the best material, especially as Peck's wife, who, without ever raising her voice or saying anything explicit, makes it stunningly obvious that she understands and excuses Peck's sins, and, as far as she is concerned, Li'l Bit is a schemer out for whatever she can get.

With its structure composed of dozens of short scenes played in many locations out of chronological order, How I Learned to Drive can be a real design challenge. Derek McLane's setting is a kind of lost highway, defined by forced-perspective highway lights set against a blurred green horizon and a moody blue sky. A '60s-era car rests upstage, completing the slightly haunted effect. Peter Kaczorowski's meticulous lighting provides an ideal stylistic match for McLane's concept. Jenny Mannis' costumes are particularly inventive when it comes to getting the members of the Greek chorus in and out of their many characters. The sound design, by Rob Milburn and Michael Bodeen, mixes automotive and highway effects with hits by the Four Tops and the Guess Who, plus Mel Tormé singing "How High the Moon," a song that takes on extra emotional weight as it brings the play to a close.

How I Learned to Drive isn't, to my mind, a conventionally moving play; its words are too candid, its perceptions too complex, its characters too restless for easy tears. But it's a work of marvelous clarity and understanding. The author, Paula Vogel, is positively allergic to exploitation or easy answers; her depiction of a deeply inappropriate relationship is shot through with ambiguities and artfully recorded power shifts. It's a powerful account of a young woman coming of age in a relationship that is both sad and more than a little horrifying, and in Butz, Vogel has found a perfectly melancholy monster.--David Barbour