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Parker, Morse & More Talk Bringing HOW I LEARNED TO DRIVE Back to Broadway!
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Oct 28, 2022
The Broadway premiere of Paula Vogel's Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece How I Learned to Drive reunites the two original stars with their award-winning director for a new production. Tony Award® winner Mary-Louise Parker (Proof) and Tony nominee David Morse (The Iceman Cometh) head the cast of this remarkably timely and moving memory play about a woman coming to terms with a charismatic uncle who impacts her past, present and future life.
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Hello, I'm Richard Ridge for Broadway World
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Paula Vogel's Pulitzer Prize winning play, How I Learned to Drive, will have its Broadway premiere
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opening on April 22nd at Manhattan Theatre Club's Samuel J. Friedman Theatre
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The production reunites the show's original stars, Mary Louise Parker and David Morse
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and the show's original director, Mark Brokaw. And we drop by a break in rehearsal
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to catch up with the company. I think How I Learned to Drive is about a woman's affirmation of her power
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again. I think that she had had some of her, a lot of her power taken from her. And I think it's
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about her reclaiming that and being able to move forward through forgiving herself as well as
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others who might have caused her harm. We wanted to do this for so long. Mark and Paula and I
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especially really tried to make it happen for so many years and it would come close and then it
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just wouldn't happen and at the time when we did it originally people really
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responded but they felt they weren't confident would have a Broadway audience
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but I think it does so I feel like we made it actually made it happen you know
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it pretty bottomless this part and I never felt like I there were so many parts but I never never felt like I cracked and I just wanted another shot at and I needed some more years behind me and some more maturity and you know and I feel like I been doing theater now for
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like 35 years, so I feel like it took me 35 years to get this certain extra something that I don't
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think I'd be able to describe but that I think I'll be able to use for this part specifically
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I don't even think I could tell you how excited I am. You know it's been so long in coming this
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this journey. We wanted to do this well 10 years after after we originally did it sort of as a
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10th reunion and now here we are 23 years later and it's remarkable and we're in a completely
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different world now in terms of how we tell the story what it's going to mean to people
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and I think that's part of the excitement is we just don't know
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you know how we're going to how we're all, I mean us audience
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all of us doing it are going to experience this You know it's very
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rare that a playwright gets to hear her words out loud in a room and it exactly what I had in my head 25 years ago when I wrote it So there already this wonderful chemistry
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I think the secret to this play in a strange way is to let laughter and comedy lift the material
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and fortunately everybody has a great sense of humor in the room
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Well, you know, you always have these little, like, you're just like, is it going to work
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You know what I mean? Is this going to be weird? Because, of course, all of us had been, like, reading the play a few days before and stuff
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And even then I was like, oh, right. Oh, right. This is a good play
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And then just reading it once, we're like, I mean, I feel like crying right now thinking about it
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It's really going to work. It's going to be beautiful. You know, I feel really lucky to be able to sit around the table with these folks because we all bring to it a foundation that I think we didn't even know was living inside of us all these years and growing
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So I think besides just bringing our 23 years of life to the play that we didn have before we bringing the play a relationship with the play that we maybe didn know was so ongoing you know inside of us So it fun to sit around the table and somebody will say a line and one of us will go I don remember that It hits in a very different way this time
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First week of rehearsal, that first table read, there you are at the table
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with these icons of the theater, including Paula Vogel, Mark Brokaw, David Morris, Mary Louise Parker
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What was that first read-through like for you two? It was exactly what you would hope it would be
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where it's everyone is just telling the story you know when you sit at a table with people of that
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caliber there's a my my hope and expectation was what it was which is that we are we actually none
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of nothing else matters except the story that we're telling and everyone's focus was very much on
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taking a breath and and then letting paula's words come out of our mouths and that's i think that's
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what makes this so incredible is that it's it really everyone in the room is just trying to
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tell the truth. Yeah, I'd agree with that. And I think when you're working with people as great as
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this, you just also kind of feel pulled up, you know, by their presence and their commitment to
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telling the story and telling the truth. So there also was that natural kind of like, I feel safe
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here, but also I feel like I'm being, you know, motivated to do my best work, which is really exciting
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