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"CRITIC'S PICK!"
"Lynx Performance and director Al Germani have done
one of their finest efforts."
- San Diego Reader
"CRITIC'S CHOICE
Lynx's stark and memorable retelling features a strong cast with powerful vocal abilities to tackle the compelling "A Capella Opera" that director Al Germani has crafted."
- SD Union-Tribune
"MUST SEE"
Cuauhtémoc Kish
SD Theatre Scene
"CRITIC'S PICK"
San Diego City Beat Magazine
"Profound intensity ... Germani earns a sincere salute, for the way he has tied together the many slippery elements of this play and inspired his cast ... this show could troupe in a suitcase but who needs trappings when there's a play worth such care and dedication? The power of the show comes from the sincerity, the proximity and the discipline of a company clearly on the same page." - Sandiego.com
"Intriguing and powerful ... a journey well worth taking."
"Captivates with powerful vocals and strong harmonies"
"Tender and haunting".
- San Diego Union-Tribune
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"How I Learned to Drive"
CRITIC'S PICK
Taboo familial relationship provides no simple answers
By Jennifer Chung - April 3, 2007 San Diego Union Tribune
'Sometimes to tell a secret, you first have to teach a lesson,” says Lil Bit, the main character in “How I Learned to Drive.”
The lesson in Paula Vogel's Pulitzer Prize-winning play isn't so much about driving as it is about survival, forgiveness and growth. The secret? During her adolescent years, Lil Bit carried on an affair with her aunt's husband.
The unsettling subject matter of Vogel's memory play is right up Lynx Performance Theatre's alley. Artistic director Al Germani, also a practicing psychotherapist, favors psychologically intense works that delve into the darker side of humanity. In typical Lynx fashion, his is a sparse, taut and finely crafted production of this complex, richly layered play.
Lil Bit recounts her suffocating family life growing up in the 1960s and '70s in rural Maryland. In vignettes that shift back and forth through time like aching memories surfacing, the story moves inevitably toward the early defining moment of her life: the “last day I lived in my body.” She grows up in a house overrun with sexual tension – her mother's shame about a teen pregnancy, her grandmother's God-fearing, orgasm-denying sensibilities, her grandfather's deeply sexist views.
Among these crass and cruel family members who endlessly tease Lil Bit about her well-endowed, prematurely developed body, she finds comfort in Uncle Peck. He becomes a father figure, a sympathetic ear and a source of love. He is the only one who encourages her pursuit of a college education; he alone seems to respect her mind, even as he lusts after her body.
Vogel refrains from making “Drive” a simple tale of good and bad, perpetrator and victim, deftly shifting our sympathies as she fills in the gaps of their forbidden relationship. Germani plays up these shades of emotional complexity, personal responsibility and moral ambiguity. At times, Lil Bit plays the coquette, coolly manipulative as Nabokov's Lolita. Other times, she is utterly vulnerable as the child who thirsts for connection and love. Michelle Procopio gives a courageous and committed performance as Lil Bit, alternately fierce and fragile, shy and self-possessed, coltish and confused.
Jude Evans is charmingly, gently manipulative as Peck, but seems to lack the underlying pain that propels the character toward inappropriate relationships (Lil Bit is not his first, only his latest and longest lasting).
Germani takes some risks with “Drive” and with rewarding payoffs. A score of period music – such as “My Boyfriend's Back,” “Pretty Woman,” “Piece of My Heart” – is liberated from the background to become an integral part of the play's emotional landscape.
The cast of six, including Alicia Randolph, Krista Bell, Allie Dana and Kevin Koppman-Gue, captivates with powerful vocal ability and strong harmonies in these a capella numbers.
Bell and Dana provide much of the play's humor, as Lil Bit's grandmother and mother, respectively. Koppman-Gue takes on the other male roles, and shows chameleonlike abilities in these vastly differing personas.
Germani also created a role for young Randolph as Lil Bit's preabused, 11-year-old self, which Vogel did not include as a separate character in her script. Randolph's presence as a symbol of purity and innocence is affecting. In the final scene, with the fading shadow of Uncle Peck in the back seat and Lil Bit confidently seated behind the wheel, her younger self slips gingerly into the passenger seat. The woman lovingly clicks the seat belt around the child.
The image is tender and haunting. Not exactly a tidy wrap-up; but a sense of hope lingers. While we may not be able to leave our past behind, we can heal our wounds and move forward.
Lynx's intriguing and powerful “Drive” thrusts us into uncomfortable emotional spaces and brings us out the other side affected. That's a journey well worth taking.
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CRITIC'S PICK
By Jeff Smith San Diego READER, April 18, 2007
The title sounds innocuous. But it refers to the stages in which Li'l
Bit's Uncle Peck became her abuser. Paula Vogel's 1997 drama, on just
about everyone's "Best Plays of the '90s" list, reveals its horrific
subject by indirection. Uncle Peck doesn't fit the drooling stereotype
(Vogel says he should resemble Gregory Peck in To Kill a Mockingbird). And
Li'l Bit is divided in half by three: "half wanting to run, half wanting
to get it over with, half wanting to be held by him."
The script also
calls for music from the '60s (songs like the Ronettes' "Be My Baby" and
Joe Cocker's "You Are So Beautiful" take on a disturbing tinge in the
context of pedophilia). Lynx Performance and director Al Germani have done
one of their finest efforts. Where Vogel asks for the suggestion of a
song, members of the six-person cast, like a Greek chorus, often sing the
entire version a cappella (and often beautifully, though whole songs lag
the pace).
Unlike the script, which has a fortysomething Li'l Bit narrate,
Germani cast preteen Alicia Randolph. She plays "Li'l Girl" -- i.e. Li'l
Bit prior to her uncle's abuse. The choice is striking, but Randolph needs
to enunciate her speeches much more clearly. The nonlinear play moves
about like a lost drunk driver. Michelle Procopio negotiates Li'l Bit's
emotional zodiac with impressive intensity. Krista Bell, Allie Dana, and
Kevin Koppman-Gue play multiple roles (and sing) effectively. And Jude
Evans rightfully understates, to the point of being eerie, Uncle Peck,
who, were it not for his harrowing perversity, would seem the most "normal" male in the story. "Sometimes Satan," the poet sayeth, "comes as
a man of peace."
Lynx Performance Theatre Space, 2653-R Ariane Drive, Rose Canyon, through
May 6; Friday at 9:00 p.m. Saturday and Sunday at 8:00 p.m. 619-889-3190.
Rating: Critic's pick.
That's a journey well worth taking.
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"How I Learned to Drive" at Lynx Performance Theatre
4/2/07 by Welton Jones
It’s been quite a spring for playwright Paula Vogel. Diversionary Theatre
is pleasantly rocking with an excellent production of her “The Long
Christmas Drive Home” and now Lynx Theatre is offering an equally
rewarding examination of a much darker play, “How I Learned to Drive.”
Vogel liberates her actors from any obligation to sustain a traditional
narrative structure, thus allowing them to concentrate on building
characters for the gradual accumulation of flash insights. The ultimate
reality of the world being shaped – dysfunctional family in “Christmas,”
incestuous abuse in “Drive” – pops into focus at a moment of revelation.
It’s a technique well served by Lynx’s Al Germani, who has stripped away
most of the icing to concentrate on the cake. Costumes are so minimal that
most of the actors seem to be in rehearsal garb. Lighting is rigidly
pooled and uncolored. Folding chairs and risers do for scenery. Even the
casting ignores types.
And, since the production emphasis is so obviously on root character work,
none of this matters a bit. The power of the show comes from the
sincerity, the proximity and the discipline of a company clearly on the
same page.
This is the story of a bright girl, struggling toward maturity in a
deplorable family given to dirty jokes about her early-budding body and
savage snarls at her groping toward enlightenment.
Her only respite is Uncle Peck, who held her as a newborn in the palm of
his 17-year-old hand, just when they decided to call her “Li’l Bit.” Uncle
is always there for her, sympathetic and understanding in a way her fled
father never was, but he asks an awful price: Her innocence.
The play is a series of scenes from her puberty to her majority, jumbled
out of order like random memories but each filling in another loathsome
gap in the story of a doomed obsession with driving lessons as crude
metaphor.
Vogel is painfully fair to Uncle Peck. He is a driven, pitiful, devious,
deplorable deviate, not unlike Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert in his
single-minded concentration on the forbidden payoff. And the girl wriggles
like a hooked fish as her bloom is harvested, finding no escape until time
grants her more wisdom and more room.
But, years later as she ponders the aftermath of their denouement and the
consequences she must live with, she finds herself asking his shade, “Who
did it to you? Were you 11 too?”
Michelle Procopio plays Li’l Bit with an intricate palette of emotional
colorings from dazed through shrewd to hysterical, always dusted with
confusion and conflict. Her least successful moments are with her
contemporaries; her time with the uncle is inevitably quivers and sparks
with the painful shredding of that innocence.
As Uncle Peck, Jude Evans is reptilian in his bright, patient calm,
shaping the climax that only he envisions, his sorry fate as inevitable as
her eventual loathing. Evans delivers a true, consistent, excruciating
performance that may prove unforgettable.
These two are set up by three adult actors playing an assortment of roles
and young Alicia Randolph as the immature Li’l Bit, who serves as narrator
and a living symbol of pre-loss innocence.
The bright and appealing Miss Randolph needs to slow down the words and
tighten up the elocution but the others are as terrific in their way as
the primary pair. The author likes monologues that illuminate important
supporting characters and Allie Dana, as Li’l Bit’s mother, gets a dandy,
which she nails convincingly. Krista Bell is mostly a frightfully crass
grandmother but she and Dana also have vivid moments as less endowed
teenage pals.
Kevin Koppman-Gue deals with a wide selection of male roles, few of which
suit him, with the same profound intensity that so marks this production.
And that is what earns Germani a sincere salute, for the way he has tied
together the many slippery elements of this play and inspired his cast to
such effective commitment.
He even had a hand in mixing the music, with Bill Kehayias, a most
successful aspect of this memorable show that, despite its easy
naturalness, deserves not to be taken lightly.
“Extraordinary how potent cheap music is,” Noel Coward noted, and the
Germani-Kehayias plan is exactly that, an a capella smorgasbord of such
period charmers as “Soldier Boy,” “My Boyfriend’s Back,” “Li’l Deuce
Coup,” “Pretty Woman,” “Walk on By” and many others, sung by various
combinations of the cast, in tune and punctuated with body percussion.
Truly, this show could troupe in a suitcase. But who needs trappings when
there’s a play worth such care and dedication?
That's a journey well worth taking.
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