The New York Times - Highly Recommended
"...If I could direct a scene representing why I love theater, it would look something like this: Mary-Louise Parker and David Morse delivering crushing performances - both sentimental and horrific, utterly complex - of a Pulitzer Prize-winning play to an enthralled audience."
Vulture - Recommended
"...I realize that doesn't make it sound like a fun 100 minutes in the theater. And Brokaw's production does show a few cracks: The glowing screens (designed by Rachel Hauck) are unhandsome; David Van Tieghem's sound design does not always amplify the actors sufficiently. But the chance to see these performers doing such incandescent work should shoulder all such concerns aside. See it for Parker, see it for Morse. Drive is also - and I'm sorry this is such an uncool way to put it - the truth."
New York Theater - Highly Recommended
"...Parker's reprised performance does the heavy lifting in a play that is rightly, and smartly, a memory play told from the woman's point of view. But it is the male character that offers the greater challenge. The playwright does what she can to establish Peck as a human being rather than a monster, but it is David Morse's memorable performance that makes the character credible. Indeed, his performance - gentle, earnest, likable, and thus all the more unsettling - is what I still remember from the production I saw at the Vineyard Theater in 1997. (Was that really 25 years ago?!)"
Variety - Highly Recommended
"...I've seen this play about a million times, and lines like that still shock the breath out of me. The play itself still sticks in my throat, as it surely does every woman and girl, young or old, who has seen it in a halfway decent production. And just for the record, this is no halfway enterprise; it's a first-rate revival of a theater piece that never gets stale, not so long as there are sexual predators abroad in the land and girls with lovely minds who think they know it all, but haven't a clue about grown men with dirty minds."
New York Post - Recommended
"...All of these scenes occur in front of Rachel Hauck's set of bland gradient columns with a nondescript table and a few chairs. "How I Learned To Drive" doesn't need a lot - or even any - scenery, but what's there right now is limiting."
Chicago Tribune - Highly Recommended
"...For those of us who saw it the first time, it is a fascinating experiment involving two immensely skilled, in-the-moment performers who always grasped the importance of understating what is a horrific relationship, so as to better make the playwright's point that intimacy evolves easily in close family settings, such as the suburban world depicted here."
Time Out New York - Highly Recommended
"...On Broadway, both the writing and the production sometimes feel a little small for the space. This is a play that thrives on, and plays with, the whole idea of intimacy; ideally, you should feel its breath on your neck a bit. But How I Learned to Drive remains incisive and affecting, not only in the ways that it explores sexual trauma as a personal experience but also in how it places that experience within a larger social matrix: the waiters and other enablers who turn blind eyes, the family members who enforce bad rules. (Day plays two of them, with perfect wry toughness.) And Vogel makes troubling points about the aftershocks of pain, and how they get processed and passed along. Sex is not a villain here, but abuse is a reproductive system."
The Wrap - Highly Recommended
"...It is a very happy silver anniversary for a number of talented artists in the theater. Twenty-five years ago, Paula Vogel's "How I Learned to Drive" opened Off Broadway starring Mary-Louise Parker, David Morse and Johanna Day under the direction of Mark Brokaw. They're all back, looking better than ever - and that includes the play itself - only now they're on Broadway, where "How I Learned to Drive" opened Tuesday at MTC's Samuel J. Friedman Theatre."
Deadline - Highly Recommended
"...In the 25 years since Mary-Louise Parker and David Morse first performed Paula Vogel's Pulitzer Prize-winning play How I Learned To Drive, the name for the disturbing process that we witness being depicted on stage has long since entered widespread usage. If audiences can now readily label what happens as "grooming," Vogel's emotionally complex masterwork remains as unsettling, disarmingly funny and as deeply moving as ever."
TheaterScene.net - Highly Recommended
"...Mark Brokaw directed the play 25 years ago and does so here again with subtlety, precision and momentum. Mr. Brokaw's exceptional work with the cast is matched by his technical mastery and attention to the visual. Scenic designer Rachel Hauck provides a perfect dreamy landscape for the material with a bare stage framed by geometric panels, some chairs and integral props. The lighting design by Mark McCullough artfully conveys the sense of the past. Composer David Van Tieghem's atmospheric original score is well-rendered by his proficient sound design. Mr. McCullough and Mr. Van Tieghem also worked on the original production in their same capacities. Dede Ayite's costume design is appropriately basic."
NY Theatre Guide - Recommended
"...In writing How I Learned to Drive, Vogel has shifted the focus from sexual predators, such as Humbert Humbert in Vladimir Navokov's Lolita, to their survivors. Though the text is painful and unsparing, it does not feel pornographic. Rather, it reveals the fear of all survivors: that they will never escape the room where they were violated."
Broadway Blog - Recommended
"...How I Learned to Drive is a conversation starter. A friend and former critic argues that the play is not really about pedophilia but about the complex emotional relationship between an older man and his much younger niece. I strongly beg to differ. Let the conversation begin."
Theater Pizzazz - Somewhat Recommended
"...While Parker and Morse's performances and Mark Brokaw's direction are solid and well-executed, How I Learned to Drive nonetheless falls short of the great theater it may once have been. Because the action that takes place between Lil Bit and Uncle Peck is considered-by today's standards-totally reprehensible, the play's rising action and building tension are completely elided. Whereas we may have once looked at the relationship as problematic, but questionable, at the start and then more complicated throughout the play, it is now seen as utterly unacceptable and objectionable from the first moment."
Stage and Cinema - Highly Recommended
"...Some plays take time to come into their own but they're well worth a wait. Twenty-five years after its Off-Broadway debut, Paula Vogel's seminal wonder How I Learned to Drive is only now reaching full impact. That's thanks, of course, to the consciousness-raising of #MeToo, among other seismic changes in the body politic. But mostly, it's due to this Broadway premiere with most of the original cast intact that softly and quietly grips us to the core."
Daily Beast - Highly Recommended
"...If you are reading this, you may be about to break this critic's other recommendation-that you go see it (really, go see it!), without knowing anything about it. The play, directed by Mark Brokaw with a sensitive restraint when the temptation to be explicit is great, is revelatory in so many ways, and so if you go knowing next to nothing you will be both dazzled and also emotionally floored at the end."
The Observer - Recommended
"...Director Mark Brokaw returns to the production 25 years later with a big heart and clear eyes on a neutral set of cool blue walls and linoleum floor by Rachel Hauck, warmly lit by Mark McCullough. In the choric roles, Day, Gold and Myers expertly generate the comic froth at the edges of the drama, keeping it from foundering in lurid scenes of exploitation. Much as the play makes a contemporary audience cringe, it is full of deliberate laughs and notes of sympathy for the doomed Peck that deliberately fuzz our moral sensors."
Broadway News - Highly Recommended
"...Sometimes our cultural impulse to look in the rearview mirror is a means of avoidance, averting our eyes from what's in front of us. Nostalgia reigns up and down the boards this season, in productions that variously cater to audience desire for reflection or escape. But "How I Learned to Drive" has not receded over the past quarter century, it's only gained momentum. The play's full impact is finally being felt on Broadway, and it's forceful, direct and too jarring to ignore."
Theatrely - Highly Recommended
"...There are many reasons why people are skeptical of revivals, especially ones that trot out an original cast member for box office nostalgia's sake. But How I Learned to Drive, finally on America's most visible stage, is neither showy nor superfluous. Mary-Louise Parker has, quite frankly, never been better, and her chemistry with Morse is enough reason to commit the production to celluloid history. Seldom does a return engagement do complete justice to its source material, but this is the rare production that proves itself absolutely vital with each passing minute of its captivating time."
New York Stage Review - Highly Recommended
"...The Manhattan Theatre Club couldn't have scheduled the revival of Paula Vogel's 1998 Pulitzer-Prize-winning How I Learned to Drive because they mystically sensed the arrival would coincide with a surge of skewed concentration on pedophilia. Nobody is that prescient."
