How I Learned to Drive
Oct. 10th, 2003 09:22 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
magidLast night I went to the HRDC production of How I Learned to Drive (Paula Vogel), a play about incestuous pederasty, done with a great deal of humor. The topic itself wasn't trivialized, at all, but the dialogue had a lot of funny bits.
The Loeb Experimental Theater is a black box space, able to be set up almost any way at all (I can't quite imagine the audience suspended from the ceiling, for instance). For this play, the audience was on one of the shorter sides of the rectangle, and the rest of the space was relatively free of a set, other than stairs going up to a door above. There were lots of items littering the back of the room, furniture and other props that were dragged out as necessary. This worked, except that the actors doing the moving tended not to pay much attention to being quiet while other things were going on as they might've.
The lighting and sound were very effective, turning spaces into a sock hop, or next to a burbling brook, etc.
The actors did a great job with the play, which jumped around chronologically to show the awful cycle of abuse, how it can totally change a person, in so many more ways than might be expected.
Not an easy topic, nor for certain audiences, but quite good.
The Loeb Experimental Theater is a black box space, able to be set up almost any way at all (I can't quite imagine the audience suspended from the ceiling, for instance). For this play, the audience was on one of the shorter sides of the rectangle, and the rest of the space was relatively free of a set, other than stairs going up to a door above. There were lots of items littering the back of the room, furniture and other props that were dragged out as necessary. This worked, except that the actors doing the moving tended not to pay much attention to being quiet while other things were going on as they might've.
The lighting and sound were very effective, turning spaces into a sock hop, or next to a burbling brook, etc.
The actors did a great job with the play, which jumped around chronologically to show the awful cycle of abuse, how it can totally change a person, in so many more ways than might be expected.
Not an easy topic, nor for certain audiences, but quite good.