How I Learned What Not to Film

I was all set to write about something strange and interesting. I love "How I Learned to Drive" - I think it's one of my favorite plays from the whole semester. And I think that's why I got so angry when I poked around on YouTube and found this.



It is not the only one of its ilk, either. Lots of college students apparently love using this play for their projects. Which is understandable - it's a great play. But it's also very clearly a PLAY. As in, it comes equipped with a neon sign that flashes, "DO NOT TAKE THIS OUT OF A THEATER!" How are you going to do that last scene with Peck and Li'l Bit and the Teenage Greek Chorus in a filmed project? How are you going to handle the monologues? How do you do the timeline jumps and maintain our connection to Li'l Bit as narrator?

The answer, of course, is that you don't. You do scenes, clips, invariably ones that don't have monologues or require the actress playing Li'l Bit to do any of the calisthenics that that role demands. And when you do a filmed version, you decide that the Greek Choruses don't work, so you cast age-appropriate people. Which in fact does not work as well as the Choruses. Take a look at this. It's a promo for a production, and I think it makes Uncle Peck unappealing, but the scene in the middle with Li'l Bit and the Female Choruses proves beyond a doubt that that trick works wonders.



What, exactly, is accomplished by making the Choruses into characters? Well, for one thing, you lose a lot of the play's theatricality and whimsy, which is crucial to maintaining the dark humor of the play. The filmed scene also moves a lot more slowly than the stage scenes. You can almost hear the director saying, "More intense, more emotional, more serious." I think going overboard on that is a betrayal of the play's very theatrical ethic. If you're going to film the play, FILM THE PLAY. Use the Choruses, use the same actress as Li'l Bit all the way through, and find a way to make it work.

Because teenage Li'l Bit, as played by a teenager, is unsympathetic and obnoxious as all hell. At least in that clip, there's no build, nowhere for her to go. She starts angry and angsty, and she ends angry and angsty with a brief overdose of uberangst in the last scene with Uncle Peck (who I rather like in that filmed section). If we had an adult actress, we'd have the same distance as with the Choruses, that allows us to get the humor in a grown woman playing a furious teenager. A college student playing a furious teenager is kind of annoying (especially since she's so close to Li'l Bit's age at that moment in time, but doesn't seem to have much sympathy for her herself).

Again: this is a play for a reason. Make use of those reasons - make them work for you, or recognize that it's hard to translate something so theatrical into film and leave it alone. But don't treat it like a realistic drama. "A Doll's House" would work fantastically as a movie. Even something as wild as "Six Characters in Search of an Author" might be fun onscreen. But when you're dealing with the kind of conscious theatre that defines "How I Learned to Drive" - that in fact makes it possible for that play to move us and make us laugh at the same time - it might even be untranslatable to film. Unquestionably its biggest impact is onstage.