How I Learned to Drive
Opening Night: April 19, 2022
Theater: Samuel J. Friedman Theatre
Website: www.manhattantheatreclub.com
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).
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April 19, 2022
If I could direct a scene representing why I love theater, it would look something like this: Mary-Louise Parker and David Morse delivering crushing performances — both sentimental and horrific, utterly complex — of a Pulitzer Prize-winning play to an enthralled audience.
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April 19, 2022
In the 25 years since Mary-Louise Parker and David Morse first performed Paula Vogel’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play How I Learned To Drive, the name for the disturbing process that we witness being depicted on stage has long since entered widespread usage. If audiences can now readily label what happens as “grooming,” Vogel’s emotionally complex masterwork remains as unsettling, disarmingly funny and as deeply moving as ever.
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April 19, 2022
It is a very happy silver anniversary for a number of talented artists in the theater. Twenty-five years ago, Paula Vogel’s “How I Learned to Drive” opened Off Broadway starring Mary-Louise Parker, David Morse and Johanna Day under the direction of Mark Brokaw. They’re all back, looking better than ever – and that includes the play itself – only now they’re on Broadway, where “How I Learned to Drive” opened Tuesday at MTC’s Samuel J. Friedman Theatre.
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April 19, 2022
But the chance to see these performers doing such incandescent work should shoulder all such concerns aside. See it for Parker, see it for Morse. Drive is also — and I’m sorry this is such an uncool way to put it — the truth.
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April 19, 2022
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.
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April 19, 2022
In fact, we should all feel fortunate to see Vogel’s ingenious play on stage and to see it so beautifully performed by the divine Mary-Louise Parker. This play is a gift, and we are lucky to receive it. I hope this begins a trend of much more Vogel, indeed.
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April 19, 2022
Mary-Louise Parker has, quite frankly, never been better, and her chemistry with Morse is enough reason to commit the production to celluloid history. Seldom does a return engagement do complete justice to its source material, but this is the rare production that proves itself absolutely vital with each passing minute of its captivating time.
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April 19, 2022
One thing that is so remarkable about Parker is her comfort on a Broadway stage. During the play, she sits at the edge and speaks to the audience so serenely and unwaveringly. Even big stars sometimes get the jitters and dive their hands into their pockets like a little kid hiding under the covers. Not Parker. Her simultaneous confidence and vulnerability is always worth experiencing, even when the production doesn’t share it.
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April 19, 2022
With a firm eye on the rearview mirror, this production reunites director Mark Brokaw, who helmed the show’s premiere at the Vineyard in 1997, with its two exceptional original stars, Mary-Louise Parker and David Morse; also along for the ride is Johanna Day as the principal soloist in the show’s Greek Chorus of three, plus lighting designer Mark McCullough and sound designer David Van Tieghem. After more than a quarter of a century, they all move assuredly in old roles as the play shifts back into gear.
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April 19, 2022
Time has intensified every aspect. It has allowed Vogel’s script to become even more of a marvel as it searches for compassion and humor in the most unlikely of places. It has given original director Mark Brokaw the chance to soup up an engine that he built for a small theater into a much larger one, while still retaining the horsepower. And it gives us the opportunity to realize the full breadth of talent within Parker and Morse, who are both giving career-best performances here. If you’re a believer, as I am, that all things happen when they’re supposed to, may this long-belated Broadway premiere be Vogel’s silver lining. The trip might have taken a while, but it was well worth the wait.
READ THE REVIEWApril 19, 2022
“How I Learned to Drive” was a groundbreaking play, if you can imagine that adjective being used for the first time. Does the play work now that these actors are so much older? In the case of Parker, a riveting, restless explorer of the human psyche who can bend time, it seems, it truly does. This is, after all, a memory play and memories abide and perhaps even clarify.
April 19, 2022
If you are reading this, you may be about to break this critic’s other recommendation—that you go see it (really, go see it!), without knowing anything about it. The play, directed by Mark Brokaw with a sensitive restraint when the temptation to be explicit is great, is revelatory in so many ways, and so if you go knowing next to nothing you will be both dazzled and also emotionally floored at the end.
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April 19, 2022
Brokaw’s stripped-down and highly-effective production accentuates the complex relationship between Li’l Bit and Peck, with Parker and Morse (who is impressively understated) giving nothing short of a masterclass in acting.
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