How I Learned to Drive

by Paula Vogel

Overview

The 1950s pop music accompanying Li'l Bit's excursion down memory lane cannot drown out the ghosts of her past. Sweet recollections of driving with her beloved uncle intermingle with lessons about the darker sides of life. Balmy evenings are fraught with danger; seductions happen anywhere. Li'l Bit navigates a narrow path between the demands of family and her own sense of right and wrong.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822216230
Publisher:	Dramatists Play Service, Incorporated
Publication date:	06/01/1999
Edition description:	Revised
Pages:	58
Product dimensions:	5.24(w) x 7.71(h) x 0.15(d)

About the Author

Paula Vogel is an American playwright and university professor. She received the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for her play How I Learned to Drive and the Award for Literature from The American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2004. Vogel was Chair of the playwriting department at the Yale School of Drama.

Editorial Reviews

Ms Vogel has written a lovely, harrowing guide to the crippling persistence of one woman's memories.

NY Times

...HOW I LEARNED TO DRIVE is a tremendous achievement, genuine and genuinely disturbing...This is, quite simply, the sweetest and most forgiving play ever written about child abuse...Vogel's delicate tactic makes sense not only as a way to redouble the dramatic effect, but as a representation of reality, a perfect case of the form fitting the subject.

Village Voice

With subtle humor and teasing erotic encounters, Vogel addresses the dangerous intersections of teenage temptation. She also paints a richly poetic and picturesque landscape...The play is a potent and convincing comment on a taboo subject, and its impact sneaks up on its audience.

Variety

...HOW I LEARNED TO DRIVE turns out to be a most compelling ride.

BackStage

"The play is steeped in a gentle lyricism we associate with nostalgic portraits of American youth. The tone, the setting, the characters seem at first so familiar, so, well, normal, that it’s only by degrees that we sense the poison within the pastels. By then we feel both locked into, and complicit with, this portrait of a warping relationship. That’s the art of Drive."

New York Times

"How I Learned to Drive is one of the best plays of the decade."

USA Today

" How I Learned to Drive is one of the best plays of the decade."

USA Today