Incest. Modern Drama. Abuse. -- Intiman Theatre's `How I Learned To Drive' Joins Other Controversial Stage And Screen Works That Are Exploring The Once-Taboo Subject Of Incest

She: a fatherless adolescent, yearning for male attention and encouragement. He: a kindly, middle-aged uncle, who takes a keen interest in his needy niece and volunteers to teach her how to drive a car.

Put these two people together in the Paula Vogel play, "How I Learned to Drive," and you get a provocative incest drama that dares to defy our usual media assumptions about victims and victimizers.

You also get a play that was an enormous Off-Broadway hit and 1998 Pulitzer Prize winner. Already mounted in London, Baltimore and several other cities, the script will have 50 other stagings soon. The Seattle debut, starring film actors Brian Kerwin and Mary Mara, opens next week at Intiman Theatre.

For all its high-gear success and critical praise, "How I Learned to Drive" strikes sensitive nerves. The inventively structured script is in the vanguard of a crop of films, plays and books that depict, in newly complex and conflicted terms, the charged subject of intra-familial sexual abuse. And not everyone is applauding.

In Vogel's play, the male abuser Uncle Peck bears no resemblance to the lingering cultural stereotype of the pedophile: a sinister rapist in a trenchcoat who lurks around schoolyards in search of prey.

Nor is Uncle Peck physically violent, or a despotic tyrant, feared by his cowering family. Instead he seems gentle, warm, generous. And rather than resist his advances, his niece, L'il Bit, appears to welcome them - until, as a young adult, she vigorously rebels.

The same scenario, in different contexts, applies to the incestuous relations in other recent works.

In Atom Egoyan's acclaimed, Oscar-nominated film "The Sweet Hereafter," a budding female musician is erotically enmeshed with her doting father.

In Peter Parnell's epic play "The Cider House Rules" (closely based on the novel by John Irving), a well-liked migrant labor crew boss impregnates his daughter. And in the much-discussed memoir "The Kiss," novelist Kathryn Harrison describes in wrenching detail a four-year affair she had with her father, starting when Harrison was 20.

In none of these narratives is the adult instigator excused. And all confront the grave emotional damage therapists say can result from such taboo and inappropriate behavior.

But in tone and style, these tales pivot miles away from such simplistic adolescent sex-abuse TV dramas as "Something About Amelia" and "Kids Don't Tell." And from the confessional self-therapy sessions on "Oprah"-type TV talk shows, and lurid news accounts of criminal cases. (In 1995, the government recorded 126,095 cases of substantiated sexual child abuse, but experts say many more go unreported.)

Vogel's play is interlaced with sly and earthy humor. And both her script, and Egoyan's for "Sweet Hereafter," present a jumbled chronology of events rather than a linear, melodramatic plot.

Applying such artistic devices to touchy subject matter is nothing new for Vogel: She did something equally unconventional in "The Baltimore Waltz," a whimsical play about her brother's losing battle with AIDS.

"I think `How I Learned to Drive' very clearly does not condone child abuse," commented Vogel recently from her home in Providence, R.I. "But you have to sit through the entire play to get the whole story.

"As artists we need to lend some abstraction, some de-familiarization to familiar subjects, in order to create real empathy for our characters. The mistake with the melodramatic Hollywood treatments is that they wear down our empathy muscle until it's dead tired and not feeling anything. We have to laugh before we can weep again. We have to be struck before we can move."

Vogel deliberately chose to make Uncle Peck a sympathetic figure.

"I try to allow directors and actors the room to create as much as I do. But the only thing I've asked here is that we come out loving Uncle Peck. From the get-go I want to make it understandable why L'il Bit would find him so attractive."

An element of "faux romance"

That attractiveness is consistent with the profiles of many abusers, say mental-health experts. Dr. Laura Brown, a Seattle psychologist who treats incest survivors, notes "the perpetrators are often charming, well-liked, socially skillfully people. And that adds to the confusion of their victims later.

"Very often these folks pick a vulnerable family member out of the flock, and groom the kid into feeling they're special. There's often an element of faux romance in this."

Adds Jackie Brandt, a medical social worker at Children's Hospital & Regional Medical Center in Seattle, "This is why parents often defer to these guys - whether they're the baby sitter, or a teacher, or Grandpa. They seem to be so `good' with children."

The tangle of emotions that arises when a young person is both dependent on a sexually exploitative relative, and damaged by their erotic attentions, is something Vogel tackled head-on.

"One case I read about concerned a teenaged boy who told the police he was being molested by an older man," she says. "He was set up to entrap the man with phone calls but at the last minute refused to give the police the phone tapes."

"What hit me," continues Vogel, "is that sometimes we can be traumatizing kids by telling them, this person is just manipulating you and they don't love you at all - instead of, this person loves you but it's an unhealthy love. That love can feel very real to a child, and be ego-enforcing. But it's inappropriate."

Some critics of Vogel's play feel that her variegated treatment of abuse is not condemning enough. Or that plays and films about this highly publicized but deeply disturbing brand of abuse are, by their very nature, exploitative.

On the eve of last month's London premiere of "How I Learned to Drive," Britain's Family and Youth Concern organization protested Vogel's play as "counterproductive."

"I think any presentation of pedophilia is damaging," said group spokeswoman Cornelia Oddie in London's Independent newspaper. "After all, we do not want it to be seen as an equivalent to car theft: something that we don't really like, but are prepared to put up with."

Therapists voice other concerns.

"I think we're becoming a nation of voyeurs," observes social worker Barbara Bean, co-author of "The Me Nobody Knows: A Guide for Teen Survivors," with Shari Bennett. "Too much is too much."

Adds Brandt, "There's a lot of pornography out there. The facts may be true in a particular story, but the message is really important."

One problematic aspect of such dramas is the portrayal of young abuse victims as seductive, in complicity with their adult wooers. In "How I Learned to Drive," L'il Bit plays up to Uncle Peck so much his wife holds the girl responsible for the liaison.

"All adolescent females flirt, but normal adult males are not sexual with them," states Brown flatly.

Brandt has "a real problem with the word seductive. It's a trigger word, one that puts the responsibility and accountability on the child. The boundaries may get blurry when an adult oversteps them. But the adult is totally responsible for that violation. If a play or movie doesn't make that clear, I think that's a disservice."

In the past, Hollywood has tried to have it both ways: condemning sexual predators, while crafting sensational images of "nymphets" - nubile adolescent girls who entice seemingly helpless older men. Censorship battles raged over such images in Elia Kazan's film "Baby Doll" and Louis Malle's "Pretty Baby." But the tale that has most crystalized the nymphet stereotype is "Lolita."

The first "Lolita" film, made in 1962, departed sharply from Vladimir Nabokov's novel, switching the title character's age from 12 to 15, and stripping away much of the novel's wry satire of American mores.

A controversial new version, with Jeremy Irons as Lolita's lust-struck stepfather Humbert Humbert, has yet to find an American distributor. The only planned U.S. screenings are set for next month, on cable TV's Showtime channel.

Literary critics, and even a few therapists, feel "Lolita" has been unfairly scapegoated, by people who mistakenly assume it condones sexual concourse between middle-aged men and prepubescent girls.

"Instead of seeing Humbert Humbert as an evil man, which is how the novel sees him, the films are all about Lolita's sexuality," says Brown. "It's viewing a child through the eyes of a pedophile."

Vogel considers her play, in part, a response to "Lolita" - but from the perspective of the girl: "A lot of women readers I know loved `Lolita,' because it puts you into the mindset of Humbert Humbert. But I've written this play as a woman, through the memories of a woman character looking back at her past. I think my gender works for me in that respect. I didn't have this in my own background, but I certainly can empathize with L'il Bit."

Providing a dialogue

Though theater managers have rushed to place "How I Learned to Drive" on their season schedules, many will want to prepare their audiences in advance for an experience that could be troubling.

"I think it's a very healing play, but I wouldn't want anyone to walk in cold and be traumatized," says Intiman artistic director Warner Shook. "We're going to have a post-play discussion after every performance, and make ourselves available for any dialogue the audience wants."

Notes the Intiman version's director, Mark Rucker, "People should know there's a modest amount of sexual contact involved. One point Paula makes is that though the physical contact may be quite minimal, the emotional impact can still be great."

Rucker considers the play's unorthodox structure a plus: "It's almost like vaudeville, a fun-house ride. By presenting the story with a lot of humor, and a sense of irony, and a complex understanding of growing up and families, she takes you on this rich theatrical journey."

Though Brown casts a vote for "any cultural depiction of abuse that's truthful and complex, and gives us a better understanding," she cautions abuse victims to consult with a therapist before seeing any show that might trigger painful memories.

Vogel concurs. But she also reports that "a lot of audience members have come up to me to say, `Thank you; this really feels healing.' And a number of therapists have said, `This play is absolutely right on.' "

To those who want to ban the topic entirely from stage and film, Vogel argues, "We live in a time of great cultural fear. We're as frightened of the arts as we are of pedophilia. The artists become the bogeyman in the closet. But I hope this play helps people say, `Let's open up those doors, and look at these things honestly. Let's not be so frightened.' " ------------------------------- Show information "How I Learned to Drive," by Paula Vogel, previews at the Intiman Theatre, Friday through July 21. It opens on July 24 and runs Tuesday-Sunday through Aug. 16. $10-32. 206-269-1900.