Prompt 4: How I Leaned to Drive

Dr. Fletcher was right. I loved this play way more than I liked The Conduct of Life. How I Learned to Drive had a greater effect on me than the other. I could really feel with Vogel’s characters, and that is something that I had trouble doing with the characters created by Fornes. I don’t know what it is about plays like this, but I find them really interesting and thought provoking. For me, a great play will leave my mind reeling.

I actually really loved Vogel’s use of the chorus members. I did a play once that had a very similar character set up: two main characters and a “greek chorus” that take on the various filler characters that are still a part of the story. These characters weren’t important enough to the plot to need their own actor. Having a few people playing the many superfluous characters eliminates the complexity of having too many people on stage. The audience is able to focus on the characters that are really important, while the other characters can fade into the story.

Something else about this play that I found really interesting was Vogel’s use of pantomime. When I first began to read the play and the stage directions described the interaction in the car between Lil Bit and Peck, I considered that Vogel chose to make the action less appalling to general audiences. As I continued reading, however I noticed that I was starting to wonder if peck was so bad after all. I thought that if the audience had seen his pedophilic more directly, it would keep us from having sympathy for him. Vogel does this for a reason. We almost get to see peck through Lil Bit’s eyes. She really does care for him. We can hear it in the words she says, and we can see it in times like the dance where she only has eyes for him. The audience begins to see the man beneath the monster. This compassion that we develop makes our shock even more intense when we see the scene of their first encounter, and the action is no longer pantomime. It is meant to remind us that what Peck did was bad, even though he may not have been a bad person.