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(The set is simple: just a group of chairs surrounded by glowing screens.)
The night is hot and drowsy so far, so Americana.
And then Lil Bit calls the man Uncle Peck.
The first time she says it, your stomach drops.
There is worse to come.
Dealing with heavy topics like pedophilia and family complicity, its postmodern storytelling was somehow featherlight, even funny.
It was accessible and serious, excoriating and full of forgiveness.
Now all three are back for Broadway.
Morses defeated elegance is unaged, and the air of infinite repetition when did Pecks hair go white?
makes the dreamy evening feel even more like a visit to the Underworld.
Its a strangelycheeryUnderworld, though.
The text interlaces first-person narration and played-through scenes, alternating emotional drama and chipper informational interludes.
Its a little unfair to the other members of the chorus that one of them is Day.
A wet woman is still less conspicuous than a drunk woman!
Who blames whom for what?
It took her years to admit that the play was based on her own experiences.
I dont forgive him, she said of the real person Peck is based on.
But I feel a sympathy, a sorrow, because of David.
This sympathy drags at the show like an undertow.
It threatens to take you out to sea.
This puts every scene at arms length.
Crucially, though, we do see one Peck sequencewithoutLil Bit.
As we watch in horror, Peck ruthlessly, deliberately, prepares the child to be assaulted.
I realize that doesnt make it sound like a fun 100 minutes in the theater.
But the chance to see these performers doing such incandescent work should shoulder all such concerns aside.
We have been surrounded in recent months by variously hysterical and inaccurate claims frompoliticiansandblowhardsabout what counts as child endangerment.
Vogel, with all her postmodern tricks, is offering a straightforward account of how these things happen.
Sometimes to tell a secret, you first have to teach a lesson, says Lil Bit.
How I Learned to Driveis at the Manhattan Theater Clubs Samuel J. Friedman Theatre.
