Play Analysis: How I Learned To Drive

In the play, How I learned to drive, it dwells between an affair between the protagonist of the play, Lil’ Bit, and her dear Uncle Peck. The affair between them both takes place through the course of her life from the age of 11 to 18 until she finally makes an end to it. How I Learned to Drive cycles through memories of issues that deal with victimization, sexual abuse, incest, and alcoholism; not forgetting about growth, acceptance, and forgiveness. At the beginning of the play, a very apparent theme would be gender. From the second scene in their household, Lil’ Bit begins to tell what it’s like at a “normal family dinner”. Whose nickname means what and how its relevant with that person’s genitalia; “Lil bit”, “Big Papa”, “Uncle Peck”

The war veteran, husband, helper, and an upstanding individual is what draws you in as an audience member. As Lil’ Bit is manipulated by Uncle Peck, we as the audience members are as well. The theme between Uncle Peck and Lil’ Bit is what you would call power when it comes to the molestation/pedophilia going on. Throughout the play, the entire affair that goes on between the two of them, it looks as though Lil’ Bit as the “power” in their relationship while calling the shots, drawing the lines between them which Uncle Peck never crosses, that’s what she thinks. “Don’t go over the line now.” – Lil’ Bit. For example, when Peck describes the way he held her when she was a child and up until now, “Now that’s a fact. I held you, one-day old, right in this hand”. With letting Lil’ Bit pick whatever alcoholic beverage she wanted at the restaurant scene and her stumbling afterwards, to teaching her how to drive and explaining it in a way of the car being a female to control, she soon takes her power back when she goes off to college and Peck ends up drinking himself to