Body Politics

Photo by Larry Gund

PAULA VOGEL'S HOW I LEARNED TO DRIVE(AT THE Taper) studies an old perv's influence upon his niece as she comes of age. Meanwhile, at Silver Lake's Glaxa Studios, a quintet of women (Beth Bates, Christina Bebes, Sera Gamble, Angie Gibbs and Raelle Tucker) perform a collaboratively developed theatrical collage, Will Strip for Food, about their real-life experiences as models and strippers. Both are essentially memory plays, with a great deal of talk about anatomy and sexuality, beneath which lies a blistering loneliness. And both works are romantic at the core, focusing as they do on the dire consequences of following one's heart in the face of society's frown. This is the same clash between desire and duty that crops up in all those Elizabethan comedies and French farces about young lovers defying arranged marriages, and in later dramas such as William Inge's Picnic, where, as in Vogel's play, a young woman finds herself smitten with a renegade drifter.

Romantic plays of earlier eras place their protagonists in conflict with a rigid socioeconomic system in which Father is always presumed to know best and of which the bartered bride is the ultimate emblem. Will Stripcomes from that same tradition, only it removes the patriarch and places the women's destinies in their own hands. With the exception of a club owner or a pimp along the way, these women pretty much do their own bartering, becoming both product and vendor in a more or less open market. Every lap dance is an arranged marriage of sorts, a one-way romance, the consequences of which are numbing for both partners.

But the most striking similarity between Drive and Strip is their dogged determination to refrain from judging the behaviors, or the taboos, with which they grapple -- or rather, to hold a variety of judgments in balance. This quasi-journalistic impartiality turns the theater into a kind of courtroom, goading us to confront our own moral wiring, our tolerance for -- in Vogel's play for instance -- a 40-year-old man who tweaks his little niece's nipples while, in other circumstances, treating her with admirable maturity and compassion. By much the same token, Will Strip confronts our feelings toward women who choose to strip, and men who pay to watch them do it. And what if one of these fellows has a wife who's been dying of AIDS for a year, and he breaks down weeping from guilt and grief in the middle of a lap dance?

Yet for all their common connective tissue, the styles of these plays couldn't be more contrary. How I Learnedhas the folksy appeal of A Prairie Home Companion, which goes a way toward explaining its Pulitzer Prize, its Obie award and the dozens of productions in regional theaters across the land; while Will Stripis a theme and variation on David Rabe's gritty 1986 In the Boom Boom Room. Under Mark Brokaw's staging of How I Learned, Molly Ringwald (playing the niece, Li'l Bit) depicts undressing for Uncle Peck (Brian Kerwin) in the abstract, with stylization and without shedding her undergarments. (In one scene of lascivious groping, the actors sit on opposite sides of the stage, each facing forward.) Whereas in the comparatively realistic Will Strip, the actors take it off, and put it back on, and take it off again. Between topless dances around a metal pole, they proffer childhood memories and ruminations about the men who pay for the privilege of masturbating before them in a private booth, or the ones who have their bodies shaved sans lather, or enjoy being flogged. At times, it feels as though director John Difusco is banking on the performers' randy dialogue and nude gyrations to sell tickets, while at the same time making a philosophical point about exploitation. All this flesh-flashing, more redundant than titillating, ultimately subverts the tease -- which may or may not be Difusco's intent. His closing tableau, a smoky, glittery sculpture of the nude quintet, derives from the contemporary myth of the stripper goddess, which in turn harks further back to pagan legend. This late in the proceedings, however, those sacred female forms have been de-eroticized by overexposure, and come to resemble mannequins in a shop window.

It's the last of at least three possible endings. A far better one occurs about 20 minutes earlier, when Bates, describing her young son's anguish over the realization that cattle are slaughtered for the sake of her leather coat, offers a prayer for the boy's future -- followed by a manic strip. Now, that's gutsy.

SET MOSTLY THROUGH THE '60S IN MARYLAND (though there's an oddly '50s tone to both Jess Goldstein's costumes and David Van Tieghem's sound design), How I Learned To Drivehas almost nothing to do with economics. Rather, through a series of sketches that span a decade or so and are deliberately out of sequence, it chronicles a love story between Li'l Bit and her surrogate father, Uncle Peck, who, yes, teaches her literally and metaphorically how to drive.

They have a compact. She will show up to meet with him if he refrains from drinking. And although he's true to his word, this is the same man who takes clandestine photos of her in his basement, undoing just the top button of her sweater after she insists on keeping all her clothes on. When he fesses up that he intends holding on to the photos for future submission to Playboy, she recoils, refusing even to look into the camera. "I love you," he blurts out at a strategic moment. She spins on her chair and glares at him. Seconds later, the sweater falls away. With a remarkable economy of language, there emerges a stage picture of exploitation and vulnerability, of love and neediness on the part of both man and child. It is both romantic and depraved.