Drive moves backward in time, revisiting earlier and earlier encounters: What we can just bear to look at when Li’l Bit is 17 gets more awful as she becomes 15, then 13, then 11. Strange things happen when nostalgia gets wrapped up in the production, which is itself a cautionary tale about letting atmosphere (the night, the heat, the past) drug the senses. Twenty-five years ago, Mary-Louise Parker played Li’l Bit, David Morse played Uncle Peck, and Mark Brokaw directed. A bumper crop of other plays came out of that soil. If it no longer seems groundbreaking, it’s because Drive was ground tilling.

So in the years that followed - particularly after it won the Pulitzer Prize - the memory play became our pattern book. It was accessible and serious, excoriating and full of forgiveness. Dealing with heavy topics like pedophilia and family complicity, its postmodern storytelling was somehow featherlight, even funny. When the drama first appeared downtown at the Vineyard Theater in 1997, it crashed through barriers, through taboos, preconceptions, formal cowardice. Paula Vogel’s play has been around so long, and been so widely studied and awarded, it changed the American theater. And then Li’l Bit calls the man “Uncle Peck.” The first time she says it, your stomach drops. The night is hot and drowsy - so far, so Americana. While assuring her that he’s been a “good boy,” he unhooks her bra and manages to get her top off.

(The set is simple: just a group of chairs surrounded by glowing screens.) When she joins him in the car, the 17-year-old Li’l Bit and the older man banter and flirt and negotiate. How I Learned to Drive starts on a warm summer night in 1969 - a night, our narrator Li’l Bit tells us, that could make a “middle-aged man with a mortgage feel like a country boy again.” That man, a big lanky fellow, is waiting behind her as she talks to us, sitting in the front seat of a Buick.

How i learned to drive the play