Child Molestation Doesn’t Age Well

W orks of art evolve down the years, as do the reasons why they strike a chord. When Paula Vogel’s How I Learned to Drive debuted off-Broadway a quarter of a century ago, it titillated and shocked. At the outset, as a teen girl and a much older man have an increasingly sexualized exchange in a car that culminates in his fondling her breasts, the punchline of the scene grabbed audiences: “Uncle Peck!” cries the girl, called Li’l Bit. Theatergoers gasped. The play’s subject — the man’s relentless campaign to sexually pressure his adolescent, then teen, then young-adult, niece — was novel enough for the play to be labeled important and daring when actually it was merely prurient, a highbrow way to consume a bit of smut.

Vogel was cagey about the topic at the time, but the work, now making its Broadway debut starring Mary-Louise Parker and David Morse, both of whom also led the cast of that off-Broadway production that yielded a Pulitzer Prize for its author, is forthrightly autobiographical. The audience pays for the privilege of indulging the playwright. “This happened to me,” Vogel is telling us, “therefore you must pay attention.”

Must we, though? The play goes nowhere, says nothing, and each of its leads is repulsive. The evening passes unpleasantly from one grueling scene to another, whether we’re in the presence of Li’l Bit’s white-trash family, whose habit it is to nickname people after sexual characteristics (her name is a description of how her vagina appeared as a newborn) or the toxic protagonists — one of them a honey-tongued lecher, the other far too willing to lead him on by yielding to his entreaties here and there. Mainly what the play has to offer is a sort of twisted, voyeuristic appeal, along with some catharsis for women in the audience who may have endured similar experiences with an older man. At the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, where the play is being staged through May 29, audience members are invited to stick around afterwards to discuss their feelings.

How I Learned to Drive is fortunate to have returned to the stage at a moment when (on the left) toxic masculinity and (on the right) grooming are hot buzzwords. Yet it is rooted in what now looks like an anything-goes attitude that was especially salient in the 1990s, when the era’s leading middle-aged television star (Jerry Seinfeld) openly dated a 17-year-old high-school student and nobody thought to judge him, much less label him a predator. In today’s less permissive and more judgmental audience, many will be disappointed by Vogel’s level-headed portrayal of the uncle, who comes across as more pathetic than manipulative and is (perhaps) genuinely smitten by his niece. He exclaims, “I love you” at one point, and for all we know he is telling the truth. Morse has said he ordinarily turns down such roles but agreed to play this pedophile because Vogel’s treatment of him is so “forgiving and loving.” Those who hope for a thunderous denunciation of Uncle Peck, or for Li’l Bit to come across as a completely hapless victim, are likely to receive the play coolly. Vogel has said she was inspired by Lolita, which in the 1990s was bizarrely misread by many women as a sort of coquettish guide to seduction when actually it is a black-comic indictment of horrific child sexual abuse.

Today How I Learned to Drive comes across not as a salacious confessional posing as serious drama but merely as an instance of the mostly female habit of what has come to be known as oversharing: Sit back and let me entertain you with lurid stories of myself. Shaping these memories into a play, Vogel relies on gimmicks: telling the story out of order (which allows Parker to show off her chops by shifting instantaneously from one age to another), conjuring up a Brechtian “Greek chorus” of three supporting players who come and go as various background figures, and employing the tiresome dramatist’s trick of simply withholding information known to all of the characters. It isn’t till the very end of the evening, for instance, that we learn how young Li’l Bit was when Peck’s attentions turned sexual: 11. He used a driving lesson as a pretext to molest her while she was seated on his lap, hence the play’s somewhat ungainly titular metaphor.

This car is stuck in the same gear throughout, though. One scene after another offers a revolting tableau, such as when Peck guides the underaged girl through a photography session and talks her into ever-sexier and more-revealing poses. As sickening as Peck is, Li’l Bit is something of an accomplice in her own abuse. In a climactic series of scenes, when he pesters her at college, repeatedly reminds her that she is about to turn 18, and feverishly plans out a night when, he hints, the pair can finally have sex for the first time and it’ll be perfectly legal, she is increasingly alarmed by his attentions. But then she agrees to meet him in a motel room anyway, and to drink Champagne while encouraging him to do the same though she knows he’s an alcoholic.

But that’s the way these things happen, the play’s fans are saying. Sexual initiations are complicated. Inexperienced girls are hardwired to please — thank you, patriarchy — and don’t know how to react to these sleazy Humberts. Adamant refusal of an otherwise likeable fellow is more difficult than it might appear from the outside. Perhaps, but so what? I learned nothing about humanity in the play. I merely learned that Vogel spent years taking part in a nauseating pas de deux with a much older man. I find no thrill of recognition here; perhaps the play’s audience simply enjoys what young people call the feeling of “being seen.”