Your initial feeling is nostalgia: A warm summer evening at the Starlite Drive-in. The smoky grill of a ’65 Chevrolet. The dulcet tones of crickets and “Stand By Me.”
If you didn’t know any better, you’d half-expect Frankie and Annette to pop up from the back seat, K-I-S-S-I-N-G.
But, no. When “How I Learned to Drive” opens, things are not at all how they appear. For our “lovers” are a 17-year-old girl named Li’l Bit and her enigmatic Uncle Peck.
But while your mind adjusts to these taboo new parameters, that sense of nostalgia does not entirely fade. For in revisiting Paula Vogel’s engrossing Pulitzer Prize winner, which launched Curious Theatre 10 seasons ago, this company is in every sense returning to what it does best: scorching, disturbing, quality theater.
Welcome back.
“Drive,” presented here with most of its cast and creative team intact, is a landmark piece for making the unthinkable thinkable. We don’t need to be told pedophilia is wrong; we need help to understand how it can happen in the first place.
In a commanding, heartbreaking and in every way triumphant performance, C. Kelly Leo, with her wonderfully wounded eyes, takes us there. She plays Li’l Bit at six ages, and through brilliant transformations her characters sometimes (necessarily) only vaguely resemble one another.
Li’l Bit does not tell us her story chronologically but, like her name, in brilliantly framed little bits that go back and forth in time, yet inevitably toward a climax that must end … at the beginning.
“Sometimes to tell a secret,” a grown Li’l Bit tells us by way of narrative introduction, “You first have to teach a lesson.”
Our first lesson is that Uncle Peck has been fondling his compliant niece since she was 11. As compassionately played by Paul Borrillo, why becomes devastatingly clear soon enough.
“Don’t go over the line now,” Li’l Bit tells Peck back at the drive-in – as if that constantly shifting line were not indelibly breached six years before.
The molestation that follows is presented with unnerving good taste. The actors never touch – Vogel knows the audience isn’t yet ready for that. The rest of the play is our preparation for how this scene will contrast with the final one.
Li’l Bit comes from a Maryland family that is not just dysfunctional; it’s been criminally abusive for generations. Racism, sexism, alcoholism, molestation, child brides. If all that sounds horrifying to watch on stage, it is – and it isn’t.
An outstanding Greek chorus of Melanie Owen Padilla, Denise Perry- Olson and Michael Morgan portray various family members as comic buffoons, allowing us to briefly laugh when their actions make us want to cry out for Li’l Bit.
So how did Peck, the only seemingly decent, caring person in this family, turn out to be the biggest monster? The same might once have been asked of serial killer John Wayne Gacy. He is a father figure to Li’l Bit. The only one to encourage her academic dreams. He teaches her history, he eases her anxiety about her prematurely burgeoning body. And, yes, he teaches her to drive – lessons that also introduce her to the feeling of control.
As Li’l Bit gets closer to 18, the relationship grows more complex, with Vogel making it impossible to affix
labels on either of them. She’s just beginning to understand her sexual power, and she uses it. He’s a serial molester whose behavior has been known and tolerated by this family.
“Drive” is ultimately a survival story that explains with heartbreaking clarity how, in the cycle of abuse, the giver grows up to become the taker.
This extraordinary piece is expertly presented by director Chip Walton and his team. But it’s not the kind of play that will have audiences leaping to their feet. Part of the reason is the subject matter, but part is the play’s overreliance on comedy, which thankfully allows the audience to breathe along the way but in the end diminishes the potential power behind the final knockout punch.
Nevertheless, this is insidious, climb inside-your-head theater that stays there. It may not knock you out, but you will leave a little dizzy.
Theater critic John Moore can be reached at 303-954-1056 or jmoore@denverpost.com.
IF YOU GO
“How I Learned to Drive”
DRAMA | Presented by Curious Theatre | Written by Paula Vogel | Directed by Chip Walton|Starring C. Kelly Leo, Paul Borrillo, Michael Morgan, Melanie Owen Padilla and Denise Perry-Olson (note: Marcus Waterman replaces Borrillo as of Sept. 20) | At 1080 Acoma St. | THROUGH OCT. 20 | 8 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays, 2 p.m. most Sundays | $26-$32 (2-for-1 Thursdays) | 303-623-0524 or
Curious: Season by season
Season 1, 1998-99: “How I Learned to Drive”
Season 2, 1999-2000: “Full Gallop,” “Praying For Rain”
Season 3, 2000-01: “Art,” “Closer,” “Fences” (with Shadow Theatre Company)
Season 4, 2001-02: “Coyote on a Fence,” “Fuddy Meers,” “Cloud Tectonics”
Season 5, 2002-03: “An Almost Holy Picture,” “The Mineola Twins,” “The Rest Of The Night,” “Proof” (twice)
Season 6, 2003-04: “Nickel and Dimed,” “Bright Ideas,” “Inventing Van Gogh,” “Columbinus” (workshop), “Yellowman,” “The Tricky Part” (special engagement)
Season 7, 2004-05: “Trumbo: Red, White and Blacklisted,” “The Long Christmas Ride Home,” “The Goat, “Paris on the Platte,” “Take Me Out”
Season 8, 2005-06: “The Dead Guy,” “Bug,” “Frozen,” “The War Anthology,” “Fiction”
Season 9, 2006-07: “I Am My Own Wife,” “Tempodyssey,” “Aphrodisiac,” “A House with No Walls,” “Mall-Mart: The Musical!” “Male Intellect: The Second Coming” (special engagement)
Season 10, 2007-08:
Sept. 8-Oct. 20, 2007: “How I Learned To Drive”
Nov. 3-Dec. 15, 2007: “For Better …”
Jan. 12-Feb. 23, 2008: “9 Parts of Desire”
March 8- April 19, 2008: “The Lieutenant Of Inishmore”
May 10-June 21, 2008: “The Denver Project”
