THEATRE - JUNE 18, 2003

Spotlight gets badge of courage for risky play

By TOM HELMA

Do people go to stage plays without knowing what they are about to see? As a theatre critic, most of the time I research the history of the play, find out what else the writer has done, maybe even read the script.

With "How I Learned How to Drive," however, now being performed by the Spotlight Actors Workshop in the barn at Fitzgerald Park in Grand Ledge, I went in cold – one foot out of the grave and six weeks into recovery from a seven-bypass (do not sneeze) heart surgery that has taken up my complete attention. I had nary a shred of information as to what I was about to see.

Silly me, I actually thought based on a snippet of information in our competitor newspaper that this was a comedy. The Actors Workshop schedule of plays also noted the phrase "wildly funny" (along with "surprising" and "devastating").

Of course, noting in advance that the play is about the developmental experiences of a young woman and her loving but sexually inappropriate uncle who is the only person in her dysfunctional family who actually listens to her but who also cannot keep his hands off her is not the kind of information that brings in throngs of people.

Heather Lenartson-Kluge is the coming-of-age young woman and the narrator of this play, taking the audience back through fragments of time when her character, "Little Bit," is 17, 19, 35, and finally back to 11 recreating a painful emotional memory of familial groping that may very well have been as painful for the audience to watch as it was for her character to experience. Lenartson gives a substantial performance in this role, providing two of the attributes that Spotlight Actors Workshop does best -- dead on clear articulation of lines and authenticity of character. It is a challenging role and she does it very well.

An even greater challenge is the less sympathetic role of Uncle Peck, played to perfection by Spotlight founder Len Kluge, who as a sexually inappropriate parent-figure is as tender and loving as he is seductive, sexually obsessed, and lacking in a sense of boundaries. The play alludes to the idea that this character suffers from a World War II post-traumatic stress syndrome, but it is "Little Bit" who sums up the most illuminating moment of the play, noting that Uncle Peck is both victim and perpetrator, with bitterness and irony when she says to the audience (I paraphrase): “Who did him?"
Rounding out what is essentially a two-person cast is the ensemble trio of Dani Cross, Jeff Magnuson, and Haley Zale who alternate as a somewhat hee-hawish family and a beatnik-black garbed Greek chorus, embellishing vignettes and narrative with bits of interesting stage action. The dysfunctional family aspect of the play also serves to illustrate the societal issue of sexual objectification of women (and men) that underlies the core plot.

Perhaps there is irony in the metaphor of the title for this play -- that in our society we pay more attention to the rules of the road, teaching young people every nuance of safe driving than we teach issues of sexual appropriateness.
"How I Learned to Drive" is a thought-provoking play that reminds us all that child sexual abuse is neither wildly funny nor comedic in any respect. Give Spotlight a badge of courage for risking such a controversial subject.

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