BURLINGTON, Vt. - Champlain Theatre at Champlain College opens its 2008-09 season on Sept. 17 at Alumni Auditorium with Paula Vogel's Pulitzer Prize-winning play "How I Learned to Drive."  The award-winning script offers a poignant, disturbing, and often funny memory play about survival and moving forward.

            Learning how to drive, an American rite of passage, is a metaphor for navigating life, where the main character, Li'L Bit, now 40-something, takes the audience on a guided tour of her disturbing youth, remembering how she learned to drive through a world fraught with danger, including molestation, to finally take ownership of the driver's seat.

            While Vogel's play deftly weaves the devastating with the familiar and sentimental through music and humor, the play is not a documentary or public service announcement. It is a story about self-forgiveness. The play was winner of the 1998 Pulitzer Prize, co-winner of the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize. The Lucille Lortel Award for outstanding play. It also received the  New York Drama Critics' Circle, Drama Desk, and the Obie awards for the best play of the year.          

            "It's impossible not to think about Brooke Bennett and others who have suffered her tragic fate," said Champlain Theatre's artistic director Joanne Farrell. " Vogel's carefully nuanced treatment of this taboo subject challenges the audience to see the issue and to question its own assumptions about our culture of women as sexual objects. We are reminded that children who are sexually abused must travel a long and difficult road to learn how to be survivors."

            Tickets for the Champlain Theatre play are $15 and may be purchased at the door. The play contains mature language and content and is not suitable for young audiences.
For more information, 651-5962.