Rehearsals for How I
Learned to Drive begin tonight and my car is in the shop. It should be
ready in just enough time for me to drive straight from the garage to
rehearsal. How I Learned to Drive takes
an accepted rite of passage – learning to drive – and uses that experience to
anchor a coming of age story that centers on an incestuous relationship between
Li’l Bit and her uncle, Peck. The play frames that relationship along a
continuum from a dalliance between a young woman and an older married man to a
pedophile’s assault of a young girl. Sound intense? It is. It is also extremely
thoughtful and very funny.
In a quixotic embrace of How
I Learned to Drive’s dominant motif, I have two drives to tell you about. First, a little more background: Paula
Vogel wrote How I Learned to Drive as
a response to Nabokov’s Lolita. If
you have never read Lolita, the book
absolutely lives up to its’ reputation. I plan to devote a whole post to the
way the book affected my reading of the play in the next few weeks. For now
though, I want to share a bit of trivia I have come to treasure. Nabokov wrote
part of Lolita in Ashland, Oregon.
You can bet I thought about that on my road trip down to the Oregon Shakespeare
Festival this weekend.
There is something liberating and romantic about road trips.
Even when they go wrong, which leads me back to my car in the shop. To keep
the story short, my car broke down in Ashland. It broke down next to my motel,
a place with all the charm of a jail-house in a country-western song. Luckily,
that motel was immediately adjacent to a garage. Two of the nicest mechanics in
the history of automotive-maintenance diagnosed it as in need of repairs, that
could keep me in the Valley for days. Or they could do a temporary fix and I
would make it home safe and sound, so long as I drove slow, did not stop, and
kept the air conditioning turned off. I pride myself on being a self-reliant
woman, a feminist, however faced with a broken down car it was comforting to
have a mechanic call me ‘sweet-heart’ as he taught me how to feather the throttle.
(Yes, I realize how that sounds, but that is the actual term for a technique
that involves working the brake and accelerator pedal to get a car to not stall
out as you shift gears. I did not master this technique, by the way, they ended
up having to make another adjustment to help me home.) The experience was a
good reminder of why driving is such a potent metaphor: cars offer an illusion
of independence and yet the roads we drive on and the help we have (some more than
others) in maintaining our cars is testament to our interdependence.
Almost a year ago, I took another road-trip. I did not have
a car, but I really needed to get out of Staunton. Two of the finest folks I
know agreed to deliver me to another friend’s place in West Virginia. The three
of us share a love of bluegrass and country music: Hank Williams, Townes Van
Zandt, Steve Earle, you get the idea. Somehow on the drive we ended up
listening to Conway Twitty’s You’ve Never
Been This Far Before. The reassuring rhythm of that song offers a
counterpoint to the lyrics’ more than slightly sinister story a sexual
encounter. The song stuck with me and resurfaced when I began work on How I Learned to Drive.
You’ve Never Been This Far Before is from a male perspective and the description of his conquest revolves
around the inexperience and clear nervousness the woman or girl feels about the
“chance” that they are “taking.” The situation is vague, leaving it to the
listener to fill in the details to determine what to make of the singer saying he
“doesn’t know” and “doesn’t care” what made her tell some third party that she
doesn’t “love him anymore.” What is clear to the man is that she “hasn’t been
this far before.” Songs like this one haunt seemingly wholesome music
catalogues. The easy-listening sixties sound of Gary Puckett& The Union Gap
contains two such titles: Young Girl and
This Girl is a Woman Now. (Vogel
lists these and others in her script.) These songs work a lot like How I Learned to Drive, using the
comfortable and familiar as a counterpoint to the common but dangerous ground
they cover.
Going there, exploring uncomfortable parts of human
experience, and offering a fictional touchstone that may offer some solace as
we stare down a subject in real life, or provoke us to think about a subject
before that day comes is one of the main ways that I believe art serves us. And
tonight I have my first meeting with the artists who have agreed to go on this
journey with me. I am so grateful to them and so excited to dig in.
