How I Learned To Drive: A review

This isn’t the sort of coming-of-age parable you’d relate at Sunday school. How I Learned To Drive centers around the incestuous, pedophiliac relationship between Li’l Bit and her recovering alcoholic Uncle Peck, set in 1960s Maryland and surrounded by bitterly domineering kith and kin and ignorant middle school peers. Through a series of flashbacks, we get to see Li’l Bit come into her own as a young woman whose gender and sexuality have shaped her reactionary worldview, and the effect she has on those who afford her value and importance.

She also learns to drive, of course.

Paula Vogel’s 1998 Pulitzer Prize for Drama winner has been tackled by The Oral Stage under the helm of its founder and Executive Director, Kelvin Wong, whose first foray into stage directing was last year’s reprisal of Tony Kushner’s The Illusion at The Drams Project. Along with him is a cast of up and coming thespians eager to display their stage chops, and this they do, albeit not without hitting quite a few speed bumps on the road to glory and acclaim, at least before intermission. Leads Amelia Chen and Johann Lim execute their roles adequately, and by adequately we mean they have their cues and lines (mostly) down. The sexual tension just wasn’t there, and for a play about incest, sexual tension is about as important as providing seats for the audience. There were moments in the first act where the only saving grace came from Cameronian Arts Awards nominee Davina Goh’s animated and passionate portrayal of Li’l Bit’s mother and Aunt Mary (separate roles – it’s not that kind of rural American family). Mark Beau de Silva also shines on occasion as Li’l Bit’s caustically belligerent grandfather, foregoing all pretenses at maintaining a foreign accent and delivering a boisterous interpretation only a cranky Chinese KL-ite can deliver.

Thankfully, the second act was less clunky, even with the continued lack of chemistry between the principals. Amelia does a noteworthy job of going back and forth in her character’s age, as Li’l Bit’s fluctuations from being 18 in one scene and 11 in another can be a daunting task to pull off for any actor. The stage design is also spare and not distracting, with the rotating dais nicely illustrating the metaphor of things coming full circle. In the end, Li’l Bit comes to terms with the circumstances under which she blossomed into the dysfunctional woman she is depicted to be. Thing is, she’s okay with being off kilter, thanks to the support she got from Uncle Peck; inappropriate familial relations notwithstanding, he was the only person in her life who did not treat her with projected scorn and bitterness. In the end, her love for driving is at once her uncle’s most lasting legacy and her one true source of freedom: she feels most liberated during the act from which her forbidden childhood tryst began. How I Learned To Drive stalls at times, but the ride smoothens out in the end for a P license in theatrics.

Text Azwan Mahzan