But while she remains a bit remote from Li’l Bit’s more vulnerable younger self, thesp is wonderfully watchable as the grown woman who survived her harrowing girlhood and can now look back on it with rueful self-awareness. Reaser wears these girlish guises lightly, without allowing Li’l Bit to slip out of character as the witty, all-knowing narrator of her own story.

Vogel has purposely scrambled the chronology of events to reflect the mysterious way that memories work, so it’s never clear at the top of a scene whether Li’l Bit is supposed to be a neglected 11-year-old, a curious 13-year-old, a self-conscious 16-year-old or a newly independent college girl. The memories that are brought to life are those of the narrator, Li’l Bit (Reaser), a grown woman looking back on her white-trash family and rural upbringing in Maryland in the 1960s and ’70s. The sky is very blue, the setting is very bare (except for the vintage Buick sitting in the middle of the stage), and the secondary characters who make up the so-designated Greek Chorus are garishly costumed and portrayed as clownish caricatures. Hence, with one foot on the gas pedal on thin ice, they learn something that will change their lives for ever: that the person that has the power to destroy us and the one that has the power to improve us are very often the same person.Surreal production style delineated by helmer Kate Whoriskey (“Ruined”) instantly identifies the piece as an expressionistic memory play. “When your breaks don’t work on ice, you‘ll have to accelerate,” he says to her in one of their driving lessons. The disjunctive “or” is the tricky point upon which we have all stepped at some point in our lives: a love that is incompatible with reality, the thin ice that is ready to break under the weight of a single mistake. The one can either save “or” destroy the other. He is a 40-year-old alcoholic, the husband of her aunt, she is an underage seeking to fill in the gaps left open by her absent father. Two people that believe that they don’t belong anywhere become lovers in the environment of a dysfunctional family. Paula Vogel’s play, awarded with the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, brings us confronted with the limits of morality. 2014-2015 National Theatre of Northern Greece How I learned to Drive - Paula Vogel

How i learned to drive paula