[caption id="attachment_70017" align="aligncenter" width="600" caption="Norbert Leo Butz and Elizabeth Reaser."]
“How I Learned to Drive * By Paula Vogel * Second Stage Theatre, 305 West 43rd St., NYC *
Run has been extended beyond March 1l
Norbert Leo Butz has been quoted as saying that, despite his name, he’s more than 90 percent Irish. Whatever the case, what’s beyond dispute is the fact that Butz is one of the best and most versatile actors working in New York.
If proof were needed, there’s the performance he’s giving just now in the first ever revival of Paula Vogel’s singular dramatic-comedy, “How I Learned to Drive,” which was a hit in 1997 and won the Pulitzer Prize the following year.
The new production, co-starring Elizabeth Reaser and directed by Kate Whoriskey, has just been extended beyond its originally scheduled closing date of March ll.
If Vogel’s unique and powerful play is less familiar than it deserves to be, it may be because it has a somewhat permissive attitude not only toward incest but also involves a sexual relationship between a mature and aware adult male and a girl who ages from eleven to eighteen in the course of the story’s action.
If incest weren’t enough, the play also touches on child abuse and destructive sexual empowerment. Vogel makes harsh demands on her actors, particularly on the male who is entrusted with the lead, a character who is, let’s face it, a pedophile and unashamedly so.
The remarkable Butz, who handles the role with amazing grace, is probably better known for his work in Broadway musicals than for dramas and comedies. He’s won two Tony Awards for musicals, first “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels” about a decade ago, and, this past season, the short-lived “Catch Me If You Can.”
Vogel’s startlingly original play is made of simple materials, requiring just those two lead actors, and three others to fill in with all the fleeting small parts as needed. The leads, Li’l Bit, so-called because she was so small at birth, and her uncle, Peck, who speaks of holding her easily in one hand shortly after she was born.
It’s impossible to know for certain whether or not ”How I Learned to Drive” has been so sadly neglected since its original production because potential producers were somewhat put off on moral grounds, but it’s a distinct possibility. If that’s the case, it oughtn’t to have been allowed to curtail the life of such a valuable work.
In a sense, Li’l Bit runs the play, as she looks back on perhaps more than 20 years of a sexually charged relationship with a favorite married uncle to whom she has become a powerful obsession.
Playwright Vogel comes from Baltimore, and her play moves casually through the rural farmlands and rural back roads of coastal Maryland along the Eastern Seaboard.
Uncle Peck is former marine who had been stationed in the Pacific, and is an experienced individual.
If he is a predator, he is, as played by actor Butz, both sympathetic and entirely understandable, even as he tells Li’l Bit that “nothing’s going to happen ‘til you want it to.”
Vogel makes few if any judgments, which makes it easy for audiences to make up their own minds about Uncle Peck and his situation. As for Li’l Bit, she is aware of her position, and, therefore, not entirely innocent.
As the three members of what the programme calls the play’s “Greek Chorus,” Kevin Cahoon, Jennifer Regan and Marnie Schulenburg contribute gracefully to playwright Vogel’s sly design.
Director Whoriskey’s graceful, well-paced production should serve to give ”How I Learned to Drive” the reputation it always deserved. And there’s no finer performance on any New York stage at the moment than what Norbert Leo Butz has achieved with Paula Vogel’s complicated, difficult Uncle Peck.
