by Ivanhoe
A&E Editor

A play exploring a girl’s incestuous relationship with her uncle is being brought to life with humor and startlingly raw emotion by a cast of Shoreline students and alumni.

How I Learned to Drive is Paula Vogel’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1997 play that unravels pieces of Little Bit’s sexual history from her pre-teenage years in the early 1960’s up to her late twenties in 1979. The non-linear story uses the not-too-subtle analogy of Little Bit’s learning to drive from her Uncle Peck to parallel her tale of sexual initiation. A Greek chorus shifts us forward and backward through her life with cheeky driving tips.

The Shoreline cast brings the fable to life with the immense subtlety of emotion that such a complex play with touchy subject matter deserves. Julianna Goodloe deftly steers through a broad range mixed emotions, showing us a girl who is both in love with and terrified by her uncle, strong-willed and yet easily manipulated. Goodloe handles all of this with the skill of an actress twice her age.

George Jonson, who plays opposite her as Uncle Peck, also brings us a layered performance as a man whose intentions are not as black-and-white as we would like them to be. Here, we want the sexual predator of the story to be a villain, but in order to see that aspect of the character, we have to see through a deeply loving and earthy Southern gentleman.

The chemistry between the two actors, and particularly Jonson’s sympathetic portrayal, makes the sexual and emotional abuse in the play all the more heart-wrenching. A touching performance by Monica Aird as Uncle Peck’s wife, Mary, sheds light on what kind of person Peck really is.

Fortunately, How I Learned to Drive is not a bitter pill to take, in large part because it is imbued with humor. The cast includes Pearl Klein as Little Bit’s mother, Brittany Fredette as her grandmother, Monica Aird as Uncle Peck’s wife Mary, and John DeCoursey as her grandfather.

Little Bit’s frank discussions about sex with her mother and grandmother provide opportunities for the audience to laugh and to connect more with Little Bit’s family history. Goodloe, Klein, and Fredette work very well together and all have keen senses of comedic timing. DeCoursey, as the country-hick grandpa they all call Big Papa, delivers some of the play’s biggest laughs.

The lighting design, funky period costumes, and well-chosen graphics projected on a screen behind the action round out a superb production that deserves to draw crowds to the campus’s Lobby Theater.

Commenting on her work in a 2004 radio interview, playwright Paula Vogel explained why she chooses taboo material in many of her plays. “Art, for me, is public discourse…it’s not entertainment.”

Director Tony Doupé has wanted to do this play at Shoreline Community College for some time.

“I read it about five years ago, and I’ve been always wanting to do it,” he said. “I was waiting for a good, solid group that I knew could take it on and do it justice.”