How I learned to Drive

Paula Vogel's How I Learned to Drive jumps around in time with a great deal of purpose. The play has several mainstays, one of which is the "Men, Sex and Woman" conversations. The conversations about women, sex and men with the Female and Teenage Greek choruses, who portray her very unhelpful mother and grandmother, tell the audience the kind of "advice" that Li'l Bit has been given on these subjects. Clearly her relationship with her uncle, and all the intimacy and abuse that it included, isn't the only thing that warped her views on relationships between men and women. The conversations also tell the audience that abuse isn't the only vicious cycle that appears in this play.

Li'l Bit is being talked to by two generations of women who are told that any sexual abuse is their fault, and help will not be available when they need it. In part II, mother confronts grandmother, yelling that if she had been given any useful advice about sex, she wouldn't have had to marry Li'l Bit's horrible father. "You could have helped me! You could have told me something about the facts of life!" And the male Greek chorus, as grandfather, answers "You made your bed, now lie on it." The conversations also indicate that Li'l Bit has been taught to not have the highest opinion of men. She has a grandfather who stole her grandmother away at fifteen, and a grandmother who describes men as "big bulls" and thinks that orgasm is a myth. And she has a mother who thinks that "men are like children" and that "they'd still be crouched on their haunches over a fire in a cave if we hadn't cleaned them up." The last "On Men, Sex and Women" conversation is a conclusion of all the messages on sex in the other conversations while also analyzing why she doesn't hate Peck and commenting on Peck's affection for Playboy.