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Photo by Elizabeth McCoy

How I Learned to Drive

Review by Bill Raden 

A lot of sensational sex scandals have passed under the bridge in the 17 years since How I Learned to Drive first shocked audiences with its nuanced and almost sympathetically inverted portrayal of child sexual molestation. Which is to say that in a world where news of yet another disgraced pedophile priest is barely worthy of a raised eyebrow, the seat-squirming factor in Paula Vogel’s 1998 Pulitzer Prize winner isn’t what it once was.

Happily, director Carly Weckstein’s accomplished studio revival of the play (abetted by William Herder’s nicely emblematic scenic design) does come as a potent reminder of just what delectable and powerfully drawn roles the script offers for a committed ensemble.

The play, which charts the seven-year incestuous relationship between the middle-aged uncle Peck (Thaddeus Shafer) and his vulnerable but not-so-unwilling, adolescent-through-teenaged niece Li’l Bit (Elitia Daniels) in rural Maryland during the 1960s, gains its power from Vogel’s use of reverse chronology in order to first establish Peck’s disarming Southern charm and genuine sympathy and affection for the object of his less-than-avuncular doting.

As the narrative moves backwards in time and the true implications of the play’s titular “driving lessons” become ever more explicit, Li’l Bit is revealed as increasingly and more openly complicit. Vogel’s coup is to upend audience assumptions about who, exactly, was in the driver’s seat all along. All relationships the play declares — even of the victimizer-victim kind — are composed of endlessly tangling and all-too-human shades of gray.

To that end, Weckstein’s staging is firmly founded on the remarkable talents of Shafer, whose knife-edged portrayal of Peck strikes a profoundly unsettling balance between sympathetic compassion and the hint of something “off” just beneath the surface. The fine Anna Walters stands out in multiple roles, particularly in her persuasive turn as Peck’s sinisterly enabling wife.

Backed by capable support from Jonny Taylor and Cassandra Gonzales, who with Walters comprise the Greek Chorus, the production, together with Weckstein’s impressive revival of Caryl Churchill’s Cloud Nine last year, is quickly establishing Illyrian Players as one of L.A.’s top interpreters of contemporary classics. —Bill Raden. 

Theatre Aslyum, 6320 Santa Monica Blvd., Hlywd.; Fri.-Sun., 8 p.m.; through April 13. https://Illyrianplayers.com