Crash course in pedophilia

Arizona Daily Wildcat photo courtesy of Arizona Theatre Company James Carpenter and Kate Goehring share an intimate moment in Arizona Theatre Company's How I Learned To Drive.

Orwell writes in Burmese Days that "some men are capable of making love to their nieces." How I Learned to Drive is just the latest to show how it is done.

Pedophilia has had a lasting eminence in literature. From Ovid's tale about Zeus' boy lover to Nabokov's 1955 Lolita, scores of titillating adolescent sex objects have become part of our consciousness. The new edition is a Pulitzer Prize-winning play by Paula Vogel.

It centers on the life of an adolescent girl who has had the misfortune of developing breasts comparable in allure to the sirens of mythology. She is named Li'l Bit by her mother who spread open the baby girl's legs at birth and saw a girl's little penis - a clitoris - instead of a boy's big penis and said, "It's just a li'l bit."

Li'l Bit has the bad luck of being an intelligent girl born into an oversexed family. Each family member is creatively named after various parts of his or her anatomy. And the family head, grandpa, wonders how reading things like Shakespeare is going to teach a young girl like Li'l Bit how to properly lie on her back.

Li'l Bit finds a more romantic sensitivity to her overdetermined sex appeal in Uncle Peck (named such after his penis). His desires are almost metaphysical. He calls her breasts "celestial orbs" and illustrates with a long anecdotal fishing scenario how he plans to reel in his young prey.

She retreats, as she says, from her body into her head in order to escape from the impure attention her breasts win for her. She also escapes from her family to college, where her mind is fed with the desserts of a newly-established feminist curriculum. At this point, the play loses its saccharine tone as the repressed memory of Uncle Peck's first sexual advance becomes clear in detail.

The script, by Paula Vogel, is an achievement. The valences of narrative that orbit around the central issue distract us from the issue's solemnity. Each scene is a different take on the subject, told sometimes metaphorically, as with the intermittent driving tips, and sometimes with a narrative summary spoken by a character to the audience. It's like a reality-based TV show, which achieves a level of objectivity by placing a distancing lens between the viewer and the spectacle.

How I Learned to Drive is a drama of exposure, but it resists giving the audience a mere portrait of a young lady. It doesn't require the audience to "suspend disbelief," as do many dramatic acts, but implies in its narrative summaries and its displaced thoughts that this is a play about a subject more than a life. The subject, pedophilia, is given in this play a post-modern attention akin to architects who leave ductwork exposed. It's pretty, but why are we looking at it?

Whether pedophilia is a subject fit for the stage has a rather overdetermined answer in that pedophilia has a long foreground. Playing, for example, just around the corner from the Arizona Theatre Company this past weekend was the movie remake of Lolita, a story about a middle-aged man's obsession with a nymphet by this name. Our sensitivity toward topics like this has been reshaped, affording us the opportunity to discuss them over coffee after a show whereas it used to be limited to confessional discussions with a priest or psychiatrist.

The Arizona Theatre Company gives audiences a sterling and thought-provoking production of this subject. The cast, with one exception, plays to the level and pitch of the script. And the set, though minimal, is thoroughly suggestive.

Though we might call this play merely the latest installment in a long series of works on the subject of pedophilia (the play rarely investigates anything other than this central concern), it is worth seeing how the modern context plays into this version. And, besides, we haven't had such a charming poster-child as Li'l Bit for pedophiliac urges since Shirley Temple.