“With David’s performance I believe we’ve done that. “I wanted to get inside this guy’s head and present him as a three-dimensional character,” explains Vogel.

But by the time the play takes on an uncomfortable undertone, audiences have developed an affection for both characters. The scenery is minimal nothing explicit happens in director Mark Brokaw’s fluid production. Much of the play takes place in the Maryland countryside during a series of highly charged driving lessons between uncle and niece. In a smartly structured series of scenes that goes backward and forward in time, Li’l Bit narrates her life story, then steps into the action with Uncle Peck and various members of their extended family. I couldn’t stop thinking about what would happen if a woman wrote the story from Lolita’s point of view.” “It was fascinating to me because it was so even-handed and so neutral. “I must have read that book a half a dozen times since high school,” she says. Her inspiration for the play was Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita.

“Critics have said that this is a play about pedophilia, but I think the relationship between these two characters is more complex than that,” says Vogel, author of The Baltimore Waltz and head of Brown University’s playwriting program. Exquisitely acted by Mary-Louise Parker, David Morse and a three-person ensemble, the play examines the obsessive relationship between a teenage girl known as Li’l Bit and her uncle by marriage, a courtly man named Peck.

Vogel’s acclaimed new play, How I Learned to Drive, now at Off-Broadway’s Century Theatre after a sold-out run at the Vineyard Theatre, takes audiences on a journey that is both tender and disturbing, funny and heartbreaking. “When you go through a journey together as an audience, your heart and your spirit become lighter,” playwright Paula Vogel says of theatre at its best. In the below article from June 1997, Vogel and her two stars sound off on creating the play and the audience response to a controversial piece of art. The show starred actors Mary-Louise Parker (prior to her West Wing and Weeds fame) and David Morse, in the delicate, yet profound telling. Inspired by the novel Lolita, Vogel sought to chronicle the relationship between a teen girl and her uncle by marriage.

How i learned to drive paula