Navigating a Tricky Road

We didn’t need the Esquire magazine Pamela Anderson “CLEAVAGE!” cover to remind us. So much in the global pop culture exists to mess up the heads of young women--in terms of body image and healthy, sane, humane sexual development, it’s a wonder anyone comes through adolescence intact, ready for the world without being merely wary of it.

Along with the culture’s persistent “Lolita”-like eroticization of little girls--for every Nabokov, there’s a hack with less than nothing to say on the subject--this free-floating image anxiety hovers over Paula Vogel’s disarming play “How I Learned to Drive,” the 1998 Pulitzer Prize winner now at the Mark Taper Forum.

Vogel has frequently written about the body, and what happens to it at which point in time. Thus far, the playwright, currently represented in New York by her latest play, “The Mineola Twins,” has found widest acclaim with her “sensitive” works--”How I Learned to Drive” and “The Baltimore Waltz” (inspired by the AIDS-related death of her brother).

All of her plays, however, revel in cheap comedy and movie-fed melodrama. It’s not so much that Vogel’s way with language is especially distinctive; rather, it’s her willingness to mix and match genres and tonalities that jumps out on the stage.

“How I Learned to Drive” details the troubling ongoing relationship between Li’l Bit (Molly Ringwald) and her pedophile Uncle Peck (Brian Kerwin). It’s imagined by Vogel as a series of vignettes, chronologically scrambled by the adult Li’l Bit as she looks back on her “cracker” Maryland background. In Li’l Bit’s family, she says to the audience, people get nicknamed for their genitalia.

Li’l Bit’s refuge proves to be a different sort of snare: her South Carolina-bred uncle by marriage, an alcoholic World War II veteran now fighting wars within himself. “How I Learned to Drive” unfolds as a series of careful, manipulative driving lessons taught by Peck to Li’l Bit on the back roads. The niece becomes the uncle’s confidant as well as his object of lust. He allows her to “draw the line” in terms of sexual contact, but proves a master at shifting his niece’s perception of that line.

Taking a risk, Vogel doesn’t victimize her female character. Li’l Bit’s hardly “asking for it,” but the play ventures into a murky gray area between victimization and consent and stays there, defiantly. Vogel is also determined to draw Peck not as a garden-variety molester but as a good man gone wrong, worthy of bittersweet compassion. (Todd Solondz’s film “Happiness” went for a similar portrayal. It may, in fact, be time for a really unsympathetic pedophile on stage or in the movies.)

Vogel’s urge toward forgiveness brings “How I Learned to Drive” to its problematic coda--a frustrating cap to a fine, tricky play. Li’l Bit says she “retreated above the neck” as a result of her confounding relationship with her uncle. Yet Vogel barely acknowledges this. Without the woman’s conflicted emotions, we’re left on an unalloyed note of affirmation.

As Li’l Bit, Ringwald fares better than she did in the role off-Broadway. She has found a directness and openness and comic acumen that works well. Up to a point. But she’s not one for hitting two emotional notes at once. Too much of her direct-address to the audience is delivered with the same half-smile; at peak emotional moments she tends to bray the lines, as if someone else were controlling her volume level.

For all that, Ringwald interacts easily with her fellow performers. Kerwin’s Peck is superb, nailing both the easy charisma and the increasingly frayed nerves beneath. Of the supporting Greek Chorus of three, Johanna Day is blessed with the best writing--Peck’s wife’s monologue stands out, a hymn to marital denial--and she’s a sharp talent besides.

Director Mark Brokaw reunites here with the original off-Broadway design team. He keeps “How I Learned to Drive” in graceful forward motion, with lots of AM radio oldies. It’s directed for maximum comic punch.

But Vogel’s play has the potential to be more genuinely troubling than this production suggests. Portraying all the other adults in Li’l Bit’s life as two-dimensional goofballs is, in the end, an easy way to make Peck seem more “real,” and therefore more sympathetic.

Nevertheless, the great achievement of “How I Learned to Drive” comes through. In Vogel’s earlier “Hot ‘N’ Throbbing,” a writer of feminist pornography talks to her abusive, potentially incestuous and finally murderous ex-husband about their daughter. “I want her to have every second of childhood that she can get,” she says. With a deceptively light hand, “How I Learned to Drive” illustrates the cost of a childhood betrayed.

* “How I Learned to Drive,” Mark Taper Forum, 135 N. Grand Ave., Los Angeles. Tuesdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7:30 p.m.; Saturdays-Sundays, 2:30 p.m (no performances March 21). Ends April 4. $29-$40. Tickets at (213) 628-2772 or https://www.TaperAhmanson.com. Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes.

Molly Ringwald: Li’l Bit

Brian Kerwin: Peck

Johanna Day: Female Greek Chorus

Rona Benson: Teenage Greek Chorus

Justin Hagan: Male Greek Chorus

Written by Paula Vogel. Directed by Mark Brokaw. Set by Narelle Sissons. Costumes by Jess Goldstein. Lighting by Mark McCullough. Sound by David Van Tieghem. Production stage manager Thea Bradshaw Gillies.