Learning To Drive the Loeb Ex in Just Four Weeks

This fall, while most undergraduates were still adjusting to the life back in Cambridge, the cast and crew of Paula Vogel’s How I Learned to Drive were already well into intense rehearsals.

As the Loeb Experimental (Ex) Theater’s preseason show, its cast and crew had just four weeks to pull together the 90-minute play—a good month less than many shows, resulting in a complicated logistical task in producing an already complex script.

How I Learned to Drive centers around the memories of a 35-year-old woman named Li’l Bit as she recounts the details of her adolescent relationship with her pedophilic Uncle Peck, centered mostly around the time that Peck spends in this period teaching her to drive.

The play shifts back and forth in time, taking Li’l Bit back through various stages of adolescence. Hodgson sums up the plays difficulty: “Practically and aesthetically things happen on top of each other.” The play delves into a distinctly uncomfortable subject matter in a complex, layered fashion, running for an hour and a half with no blackouts.

Hodgson approaches the play’s temporal complexity by eschewing tricks of props or scenery, relying instead on their actors’ performances to clarify the ages of the characters in each scene. As Li’l Bit (Sara L. Bartel ’06) moves in age from 35 to 17 to 15 to 13 and finally 11 throughout the course of the play, she has subtle props to aid her transformation: a hair tie, a scarf tied loosely around the waist and large silver hoop earrings. But she remains in the same basic outfit throughout the duration of the play, and the audience mainly relies on Bartel’s gestures and mannerisms to indicate her shifting age.

The nonsequential chronology also means that the script shifts settings rapidly. Because of the need for quick scene changes, Hodgson and his cast and crew required a versatile stage space containing as few trappings as possible. They use a minimum of heavy furniture, bringing out only a table for a family dinner or two chairs when Li’l Bit and Uncle Peck are in the car.

Light and sound also help to root each of Li’l Bit’s memories in a particular place and time: warm light creates a moonlit night in the car or period music adds authenticity to a scene when she attends a school dance.

First-time director Robert M. Hodgson ’05 had his cast—which he selected back in May, rather than through the normal common casting process in September—learn their lines over the summer in preparation for rehearsals beginning Sept. 7.

Hodsgon also had to track down funding, since the Harvard-Radcliffe Dramatic Club (HRDC) does not provide funding for pre-season shows in the Ex. As such, Hodgson needed to find alternate sources to provide the backing for his play.

He was in the middle of writing up proposals for various grants when he reached a breakthrough with the Gilbert and Sullivan Players. “G&S actually approached the HRDC about funding a pre-season show in the Ex themselves,” says Hodgson. “It happened about halfway through the grant application process for us, and we simply found out that they had offered to co-produce the preseason show and provide funds.”

“It was certainly a tight rehearsal period,” says Hodgson, “but because we were coming into September with a full cast and crew assembled…we actually ended up with a productive, awesome four weeks of intense rehearsals.”