The thrilling Broadway premiere of Paula Vogel’s Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece How I Learned to Drive reunites the original stars with their award-winning director for a new production. Tony Award® winner Mary-Louise Parker (The Sound Inside, Proof) and Tony nominee David Morse (The Iceman Cometh) are joined by Tony Award® nominee and original cast member Johanna Day, Alyssa May Gold, and Chris Myers in this remarkably timely and moving memory play about a woman coming to terms with a charismatic uncle who impacts her past, present and future life. Directing is Mark Brokaw (Heisenberg).
Director Mark Brokaw returns to the production 25 years later with a big heart and clear eyes on a neutral set of cool blue walls and linoleum floor by Rachel Hauck, warmly lit by Mark McCullough. In the choric roles, Day, Gold and Myers expertly generate the comic froth at the edges of the drama, keeping it from foundering in lurid scenes of exploitation. Much as the play makes a contemporary audience cringe, it is full of deliberate laughs and notes of sympathy for the doomed Peck that deliberately fuzz our moral sensors.
It would be some comfort to say that Vogel's taxonomy of how men and women are socialized into sexual beings feels outdated or old-fashioned, but it surely doesn't. This reunion of original stars Mary-Louise Parker and David Morse rather feels like a kind of haunting, confronting the present with ghosts who never left. The play's long-overdue Broadway premiere is bracing, intimate, expertly inhabited and a rare chance to see artists reanimate their work with the benefit of wisdom.
1997 | Off-Broadway |
Off-Broadway |
2012 | Off-Broadway |
Second Stage Theatre Production Off-Broadway |
2022 | Broadway |
Manhattan Theatre Club Broadway Premiere Broadway |
Year | Ceremony | Category | Nominee |
---|---|---|---|
2022 | Drama Desk Awards | Outstanding Revival of a Play | How I Learned to Drive |
2022 | Drama League Awards | Distinguished Performance Awards | David Morse |
2022 | Drama League Awards | Outstanding Revival of a Play | How I Learned To Drive |
2022 | Outer Critics Circle Awards | Outstanding Revival of a Play (Broadway or Off-Broadway) | How I Learned to Drive |
2022 | Outer Critics Circle Awards | Special Achievement Awards | Johanna Day |
2022 | Tony Awards | Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role in a Play | David Morse |
2022 | Tony Awards | Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role in a Play | Mary-Louise Parker |
2022 | Tony Awards | Best Revival of a Play | How I Learned to Drive |
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