Looking
for great theatre on a shoestring ? See this
Review
by Peter Birnie, Vancouver Sun pbirnie@png.canwest.com
Paula
Vogel's How I Learned to Drive won the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for
drama, and rightly so. This sharp slice of life cuts painfully
close to the bone as it details a disturbing sexual relationship
between a teenage girl and her uncle; a finely tuned production
directed b y the ever-inventive James Fagan Tait brilliantly illuminates
a truly 20th-century horror story.
It's an encouraging sign of the confidence within our small theatre
scene that Overdrive Productions can remount its hit from last
year's Fringe Festival with some assurance Vancouver audiences
will recognize real talent and support it. See How I Learned to
Drive for a 90-minute primer on how to present great theatre on
a shoestring.
All we see on stage are actors and chairs. Tait arranges them
in many clever ways, not to distract us from Vogel's script but
to highlight its gripping complexity. The story runs roughly in
reverse order but the beauty of Vogel's chopped-up timelines is
that the play fractures neatly into painful little bits.
How appropriate, since the heroine is Li'l Bit, a girl with a
cruel genitalia reference for a name. Her pedophilic uncle Peck,
also crudely named with his crotch in mind, fell in love with
Li'l Bit from the moment her first held her in the palm of his
big hand, and How I Learned to Drive is a tour of his seduction
of the poor child.
Opening night came at the end of a hot day, so Performance Works
was appropriately stuffy as Allan Morgan drawled through a taut
performance as the big Southerner hiding a horrible secret. Like
the best of the bastards in the Tennessee Williams canon, wily
Uncle Peck is far scarier than any stereotype of an old pervert.
He is in fact a charming guy with a loving wife and endless generosity.
Lurking behind those glazed eyes, however, is a monster slowly
revealed by the veteran actor.
Eileen Barrett's Li'l Bit is just as interesting, especially as
Vogel's script gives her the lion's share of revelations about
what's really going on. From a barely post-adolescent girl too
eager to please to the adult destroyed by her past, Barrett conveys
Li'l Bit's many facets without relying on cheap characterizations.
Completing the cast are Tammy Bentz, Jacque Lalonde and Kelly
Metzger. Tait uses them spiritually as a Greek chorus and physically
as a design element, and Bentz is especially interesting in a
cameo as Peck's deliberately deluded wife.
See it and squirm.
