It’s been 25 years since Paula Vogel’s landmark drama about sexual assault and its reverberations first debuted Off-Broadway. Since then, private transgressions, like those that Li’l Bit experiences at the hands of her Uncle Peck in “How I Learned to Drive,” have more often been exposed and met with public condemnation, particularly in the wake of #MeToo.
It would be some comfort to say that Vogel’s taxonomy of how men and women are socialized into sexual beings feels outdated or old-fashioned, but it surely doesn’t. This reunion of original stars Mary-Louise Parker and David Morse rather feels like a kind of haunting, confronting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.
