MLP: People who came into those theaters ate it up. Have audiences changed in the years since you first performed the play? There’s not a more perfect baptism, I think. So many kids are beginning their careers on their phones, and we started our lives in black boxes and weird spaces and performing on the street. When I got out of school, I wanted to be a regional theater actress and an Off-Broadway actress, I wanted to do new plays, and that was possible then. I love the reverence with which the younger cast members speak of you and your work and the way they feel so honored to be in this production. MLP: I feel like you’ve made a lot of audience members very lucky.

I personally feel that this is the age of these two performers that I thought of when I wrote the play it’s gotten so rich with 20 years behind us, and for me this is the world I dreamed of, and I feel very lucky.ĭavid Morse and Mary-Louise Parker in the 1997 production of How I Learned to Drive, which is being revived now on Broadway with the two stars and the play’s original director. I completely forget that I wrote the play every time that I see it on stage it’s an otherworldly experience. These performances that Mary-Louise and David are giving are the performances of my lifetime. If you had asked me, I would have liked a revival in 1998. It might have been great to do it five or 10 years ago, but there’s something it has now from that passage of time. How would we make that happen? But over time, it became something that was more possible. I remember at the time the Village Voice had a picture of David and me on the cover with the headline “Theater Too Tough for Uptown.” Back then, it would have been hard to imagine gathering a Broadway audience for this play, or maybe not gathering the audience but investors or the people who puts things together. Of course, to have a playwright like Paula on Broadway, would always have been such a blessing and was something we all wanted. As soon as it became a feasible idea to remount the play, we were interested in doing it. Mary-Louise Parker: It’s interesting because I don’t feel like the other production ever stopped, at least not within me. What was behind the idea to revisit it with cast members and the director of the original? This play first premiered in 1997, and a revival was due on Broadway in 2020-which is finally happening now. Here, Parker and Vogel speak with Town & Country about revisiting Drive, the changing nature of Broadway, and why no play can ever truly be considered finished. Alyssa May Gold, David Morse, Mary-LouiseParker, Johanna Day, and Chris Myers in How I Learned to Drive, playing now at Broadway’s Samuel J.

Paula vogel broadway