Survivor stories are typically not portrayed in so nuanced a manner. The Beltsville Drive-In on US-1 in Beltsville, MD It aches as a bittersweet testimony to ambivalent legacies and to inherited disease passed down not through DNA but by means of hand and mouth-that is, through behavior and mental shaping. It portrays the depths of love and hurt, of tenderness and transgression, that can come from our earliest and closest relationships. The content of Li’l Bit’s account is extraordinary, not so much in its extremity, but in its nuance. While such a nonchronological sequence of plot may seem counterintuitive for a play, it mirrors the retrospective manner of story revelation in that most classic of plots, Oedipus Rex. Li’l Bit’s narrative is delivered carefully, gradually-using flashbacks that are out-of-sequence, indeed that move mainly backward in time, as if the older memories are more remote or more difficult to share. She frames this story euphemistically- How I Learned to Drive. Our central character, whom we know as Li’l Bit, appears before us as a grown woman, ready to share her story of decades past, when she was a teen coming up in 1960s rural Maryland.

Having premiered in 1997, it anticipated the “Me Too” movement and its surge of women standing up and sharing their experiences that range from sexual abuse to inappropriate comments in the workplace. There are a variety of lenses through which we may see what follows. With this enigmatic line, the play begins. “Sometimes to tell a secret, you first have to teach a lesson.” The play’s method of confrontation is gentle, startling, raucous, funny, devastating and intimate. This play ventures into the uncomfortable, even explosive areas of pedophilia, molestation and hyper-sexualization, but its chief confrontation is with the Nemesis in whose shadow these diseases ferment-our Patriarchy. It’s also one of the most excellently crafted.

How I learned to Driveis among the most important plays of the last 50 years. Julia Gibson as “Li’l Bit” in PlayMakers Rep’s 2019 Production of “How I Learned to Drive,” directed by Lee Sunday Evans.

How i learned to drive story