Rules of the Road How I Learned to Drive opens at Circuit Playhouse. by CHRIS DAVIS ensate flesh and bone transforms itself into molded rubber and steel. Tuck-and-roll back seats bear the weight of rape and teenage jubilation. The American Dream becomes a four-wheeled prison; V-8 tucked beneath its hood, providing only the illusion of escape. Driver humans scan the horizon, not in search of gas, food, or lodging, but identity. Greasy footprints on the windshield, like ancient cave paintings, only tell part of the story. Paula Vogel's Pulitzer Prize-winning drama How I Learned to Drive deserves all of the praise that has been heaped upon it. Its subject matter: pedophilia. Its tone: pitch-black comedy. Vogel's one-act play takes the audience on a midnight ride through the darkest, most brutal regions of the American psyche, into the familial wastelands where only Sam Shepard has dared to go before. Told in a deft, quasi-narrative style, HILTD is a staged memory that makes The Glass Menagerie seem obsolete. Unlike Tennessee Williams, Vogel has no use for "a fiddle in the wings." The action shifts back and forth through time with the ease of thought. Fatherless and in need of a male role model, L'il Bit (played by Kim Justice) turns to her kindly, charismatic Uncle Peck (Barclay Roberts) for companionship and guidance. Peck begins a slow, methodical seduction of his niece, who by age 13 becomes a willing participant in the sordid events, agreeing to continue their weekly "driving lessons" in order to reward her uncle for not drinking. The plot is as intricate and fragile as a cathedral built of cards, and love is the glue that holds everything together. Vogel refuses to place blame or make monsters out of tragic men. Instead, her play grapples with issues of forgiveness and understanding. The Village Voice called How I Learned to Drive "the sweetest play about child abuse ever written." So it is. Christopher Rico's scenic design places both the family dining room and Peck's car smack dab in the middle of a lonesome highway. His simple abstraction, painted (not so heavy handedly) in shades of gray, intensifies the power of director Jerry Chipman's lean blocking, allowing the stage-pictures (an expression I generally loath) to speak as loudly as Ms. Vogel's unminced words. Veteran director Chipman, who, truth be told, I had written off years ago as a less-than-insightful artist, a cliquish impresario of theatrical inbreeding coasting on his own inertia, has of late emerged as the great elder-statesman of our local stage. His deliciously gaudy production of last season's As Bees in Honey Drown at Theatre Memphis was the work of a master craftsman, and with HILTD, he shows remarkable depth and understanding. His program notes point out that during the course of rehearsals the expression "child abuse" was never used. To his credit, HILTD tempers the realism of Chekhov with the formalism of Brecht, circumventing the need for any tedious, self-indulgent forays into psychoanalysis. What can I say about Barclay Roberts that has not already been said? Plenty. He is an actor who has never received the credit he deserves for his consistently credible work. Roberts does not change much from role to role, he does not "go to the character." Instead he brings the character to him, and he does so with tremendous honesty. As Uncle Peck, Roberts is charming, rugged, surprisingly suave, and utterly lost. It is his best work yet. As Li'l Bit, Kim Justice is fantastic, and though she does very little physically or vocally to age herself (or become youthful as the case may be) she is as believable at 11 as she is at 35. She, too, is charming and lost. Her efforts to reassemble the past smack more of hunger than desperation. When, in the role of narrator she asks her dead uncle, "Who did this to you?" Justice sounds more like a concerned mother than a victim. It is profound and resonant choice. Filling ancillary roles and functioning as a Greek chorus, Kevin Jones, Jo Lynn Palmer, and M. Michele Somers round out the cast. All do excellent work. Somers, filling the role of Peck's tight-lipped wife, is stunning, heartbreaking, and powerfully understated.