Norbert Leo Butz has always brought a certain strangeness to his roles, whether a buffoonish con artist in “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels” or an obsessive FBI agent in “Catch Me If You Can.” But as the pedophile Uncle Peck in “How I Learned To Drive,” he’s all too human, inducing feelings of revulsion and sympathy all at once.
Paula Vogel’s drama — a 1997 Pulitzer Prize winner — is a highly delicate balancing act. It daringly adopts a frequently lighthearted tone in its depiction of the yearslong molestation of a teenage girl, Li’l Bit (Elizabeth Reaser), by her uncle. It even employs a “Greek Chorus” (Kevin Cahoon, Jennifer Regan, Marnie Schulenburg) to play all of the other parts and serve as comical commentators.
But the Second Stage Theatre revival, directed by Kate Whoriskey (“Ruined”), is not quite successful in handling the play’s wildly shifting tones.
Such moments as when the chorus morphs into a doo-wop singing group or delivers an over-the-top warning about “white slavery” while Uncle Peck is plying his underage niece with alcohol feel more trivial than ironic — gimmicky rather than illuminating.
The casting is another problem, especially for those lucky enough to have seen the sublime David Morse and Mary Louise-Parker in the original production. Morse brought a casual seductive charm to Uncle Peck that made his allure to his underage niece (by marriage) all the more insidious. Butz movingly conveys the character’s alcoholic despair, but he seems too creepy. And Reaser, while certainly embodying Li’l Bit’s physical ripeness, is more effective at depicting her wounded innocence than the precocious slyness that leads her aunt to comment that she “knows exactly what she’s doing.”
Despite these problems, “How I Learned To Drive” still manages to bring a startling complexity to its queasy subject matter. It’s an uncomfortable play to watch. And that’s exactly as it should be.