St. Ed's players make dramatic detour with `Drive'
By MIKE VANEGAS
Scene Editor
Glaring at everyone making their journeys throughout the halls of campus buildings is a breast.
This breast is an advertisement for a play. The play, "How I Learned to Drive," seems to be taking a cue from other taboo breakers — like a penis-infested Student Film Festival. Performed by the St. Edward's Hall Players, it is not an ode to the female breast, but a commentary about sexual deviance and the family.
"How I Learned to Drive" follows the memories of an adult Li'l Bit who had a sexual relationship throughout her adolescence with her aunt's husband, Uncle Peck. A conversation with the play's director, senior Sean Dwyer, illuminated the reasoning behind bringing this somewhat controversial play to Notre Dame.
"I was looking for something that was a modern work," he said. "Normally the STEDS show is done with comedy, but I didn't want it to be something mindless, I wanted something that would also have a message to it."
Paula Vogel, the playwright behind "How I Learned to Drive," won the Pulitzer Prize in 1998 for the drama. Despite the fact that the play includes some seriously mature roles that must be acted well for the play to be a success, Dwyer felt he found the right actors to fill the main roles.
"It's really a difficult thing to do when you're working with actors who are 18 to 23, for the older roles. You can't do it on looks so much as you do it on maturity and character," said Dwyer. "John Area, who plays [45-year-old] Uncle Peck, he really has great instincts when it comes to his acting. He just kind of brings a worldliness and a maturity that really would suggest an actor with many more years in training."
Area noted the difficulty in playing the middle-aged character.
"It's really something very different from what I've played in the past," he said. "People tend to typecast me in the nice guy kind of role. It's the first role I've ever played that is inherently kind of bad." But Area added that Vogel characterized Uncle Peck as a victim, as opposed to a villain.
Beth Hoffman plays Li'l Bit, the multi-aged character who must deal with the emotional bearing of an incest victim.
"She's a younger actor. She's a sophomore," said Dwyer. "What I liked about Beth is she really doesn't put up any walls around herself. She works incredibly hard and if you ask her to give you something in rehearsal, she's willing to do it. And emotionally, she's willing to go as far as you push her.
"And as a director, it's much easier to bring someone back and to confine the performance, then to constantly have to draw it out, and make it bigger. The fact that she has to play Li'l Bit at so many different ages and in so many different situations, that definitely was something I was looking for."
Hoffman commented on the respect she paid to her character.
"She has this incredible strength which I think all of us are looking for at some point in their lives," she said. "The really amazing thing is that she calls on it and uses it and pulls herself through."
Dwyer's satisfaction with his two lead actors may be surprising to some people who will doubt the capabilities of naïve college students taking on such tough subjects. But he insists there is nothing to worry about in terms of being honest to the text.
"I've been satisfied with the whole cast. I think they've done really well with the material," he said. "It's a hard script to do with actors who have just started their formal training. Even myself, I'm a senior major, but I'm just kind of finishing up the first steps of my training. But I think they've done very well."
Of course, he really couldn't do anything but praise his cast. Nor could he withdraw himself from the confidence he feels heading into the weekend, despite the fact he missed the play's last dress rehearsal Wednesday evening so he could attend a funeral.
"I feel very confident," he said. "It will be a play that the audiences will enjoy, but that hopefully will also be something that they can take a few messages away from."
"How I Learned to Drive" will be playing this weekend at Washington Hall. Showtimes are 8 p.m., Thursday through Saturday. Tickets are $5 each and are available at LaFortune or at the door.
All Scene Stories for Thursday, February 3, 2000
