Feminist Drama &

How I Learned to Drive

Week 12段馨君 副教授國立交通大學人文社會學系

FEMINIST DRAMAIn 1970, Kate Millet wrote the influential

Sexual Politics, which called attention to gender bias in politics and in art.

She illustrated ways of recognizing and interpreting the “image of woman”in literature written by men as misogynistic and subversive to women’s interest.

Sue-Ellen Case, noted the absence of women as playwrights and the biased treatment of women as characters of fiction and drama.

Gertrude Stein, a truly original writer, experimented with language, syntax, and musical forms.

FEMINIST DRAMA

The consciousness of audiences and readers about women’s lives, feelings, needs and ambitions.

Today’s feminist drama is a further articulation of women’s viewpoints and vew dramatic forms for mirroring the special rhythms, emotions, and experiences of women.

GENDER, ART AND POLITICS

Marsha Norman, Beth Henley, and Paula Vogel emerged from the regional theaters

Julie Bovasso, Maria Irene Fornes, Tina Howe, and Suzan-Lori Parks came from Off Off Broadway

In their work, women’s biologism and ssuch social issues as pedophilia, rape, domestic violence, and discrimination serve as ultimate signs of women’s oppression and victimization by men.

GENDER, ART AND POLITICS

Lesbian feminism resists bothh patriarchy and compulsory heterosexuality and celebrates the lesbian experience and perspective.

This viewpoint also includes an acknowledgement of the invisibility or unmarked identity of women in modern cultures and social groups.

GENDER, ART AND POLITICS

The feminist critics recognized today in the US for their pioneering writing on theater and performance are Sue-Ellen Case, Gayle Austin, Lynda Hart, Jill Dolan, Peggy Phelan, and Elin Diamond.

In writing for the theater, feminist playwrights introduced new subjects, vocabularies, characters, forms and alternative modes of perception.

FEMINIST THEORY

Feminist play structure has a contiguous organization characterized by nonlinear narrative, fragmentary scenes, elliptical forms, indirect dialogue, ambiguity rather than clarity and interrupted rather than completed action.

Their experience of time and relationships is one of constant interruption.

FEMINIST PLAY STRUCTURE

Paula Vogel's play How I Learned to Drive opened in New York in February 1997. The play concerns an affair between its protagonist, named Li'l Bit, and her uncle Peck.

The affair takes place over the course of years, with the character of Li'l Bit maturing from age eleven to eighteen before she puts an end to it.

BACKGROUND

In spite of the serious situation, there are many comical elements of the play, which avoids the expected condemnation of this situation to look at the basic humanity that binds these two characters.

BACKGROUND

It uses innovative staging techniques to fade from one time frame to another and one place to the next.

It also uses just three actors, in addition to those playing Li'l Bit and Peck, to represent all of the other characters who affect their lives, especially their quirky, intimidating rural Maryland family.

BACKGROUND

Lil' BitUncle PeckLil' Bit's motherLil' Bit's grandmotherLil' Bit's grandfather

CHARACTER

It starts with Li'l Bit as an adult, addressing the audience, as if she is giving a lecture about how to drive.

She describes Maryland during her youth in the 1960s, and then the setting dissolves into 1969, with her uncle Peck sitting in a Buick Riviera. Seventeen-year-old Li'l Bit climbs in next to him.

PLOT

He takes the role of a child, telling her that he has been good, and she acts like an authority figure to him.

When he says that he has not had a drink all week, she allows him the ‘‘small reward'' of undoing her bra. When they leave their parking spot, Li'l Bit drives.

PLOT

At a family dinner in 1969, the conversation focusing on the size of her breasts is embarrassing to Li'l Bit.

Her grandfather makes one wise crack after another about her breasts being big, until Li'l Bit flees the room for some privacy.

Peck is the one who follows her and consoles her. Feeling better, Li'l Bit arranges to meet him later that night.

PLOT

Grown-up Li'l Bit, as narrator, explains to the audience that she was kicked out of school in 1970 for constant drinking and then took a job in a factory and spent her nights drinking and racing through the streets in her car.

PLOT

The scene fades to Li'l Bit and Peck at an inn far from home along the Maryland shore in 1968 (a year before the family dinner portrayed earlier).

The occasion is a celebration of Li'l Bit having received her driver's license. Peck, who has had a drinking problem, does not order a drink, but he tells Li'l Bit to have one, even though she is only sixteen.

PLOT

Li'l Bit's mother shows up at the side of the stage to give the audience ‘‘A mother's guide to social drinking,’’ which includes such advice as to eat much bread and butter and never to order sugary "ladies'' drinks.

Li' l bit orders a martini and quickly becomes drunk.

PLOT

When they leave, she is hardly able to walk, and she expects Peck to try to take advantage of her.

She objects to their relationship, and he tells her not to worry, that he is a man and will not do anything sexual until she wants to.

PLOT

• Director: Rhodes students • Leading actor: Rhodes students • Year: 2009• Showing Part: several scenes from the

play • From 00:00 to 01:33• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jn-

XhonUSLI

FILM-CLIPS

• Director: USC students• Leading actor: USC students• Year: 2008• Showing Part: Li’l Bit and her family• From 00:00 to 03:30• http://www.youtube.com/watch?

v=hnqdDIWX5IA&feature=related

FILM-CLIPS

• Director: students from Indiana University Department of Theatre and Drama

• Leading actor: Indiana University students • Year: 2010• Showing Part: several scenes from the

play • From 00:00 to 01:49• http://www.youtube.com/watch?

v=lfs35SEMWPE

FILM-CLIPS

• Director: Roberto Prestigiacomo• Leading actor: Pamela Roza, Matthew

Wright• Year: 2010• Showing Part: Li’l Bit and her uncle Peck• From 00:00 to 02:24• http://www.youtube.com/watch?

v=_T7X1mobARE

FILM-CLIPS

Paula Vogel writes as a radical feminist with women as the center of situatons that portray the effects of male dominatino and abusive behavior toward women.

Focus Vogel’s twin themes of incest and pedophilia, which drive the play.

ANALYSIS

Vogel’s nonlinear narrative is madeup of nineteen scenes that portray the sexual initiation of Li’l Bit.

Li’l Bit’s family and friends form the backdrop to explaiin her socially conditioned responses to her sexual initiation by an adult relative.

ANALYSIS

The story’s complexity is enlarged by Peck, whose personal history is that of pedophile, voyeur, and sexual deviant.

ANALYSIS

The play is framed by Li’l Bit’s two monologues, which set the emotional and physical landscape for the adolescent’s sexual molestation.

ANALYSIS

Li’l Bit’s unspoken lesson is the residual effects, twenty years later, of her seven-year sexual molestation during her formative adolescent years.

ANALYSIS

The final scene suggests that Li’l Bit can’t fully escape the consequences of her abusive past. She has been damaged but she can come to an understanding of her relationship with Peck.

As she works toward finding self-forgiveness, understanding and peace, she is effectively getting on with her life.

ANALYSIS

http://www.enotes.com/how-learned-drive/themes http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_I_Learned_to_Drive http://

www.bookrags.com/lens/go.php?u=How_I_Learned_to_Drive

http://theater.nytimes.com/mem/theater/treview.html?res=9807E3DB1138F93AA2575AC0A961958260

REFERENCE