Additional Information Ending, Leaving, Remaining: Young Women and Trauma in Fairview and How I Learned to Drive

Authors

Arleigh Rodgers

Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, the first paragraph of the essay follows:

The young female protagonists in Jackie Sibblies Drury's Fairview (2018) and Paula Vogel's How I Learned to Drive (1997) find themselves defined by personal narratives not of their own making but by stories that the plays' other characters tell about them. In Fairview, the young Black heroine Keisha is defined by the trauma of racism when White characters usurp her family's birthday party and perform stereotypical views of Black girls like Keisha, who is, as they suppose, burdened by a teen pregnancy and unable to afford college.¹ In what theatre critic Ben Brantley calls the play's "final kill," Keisha invites the White identifying audience members to switch places with her on stage, so that she might develop a sense of identity outside of the omnipresent White gaze.² In Keisha's yearning for an identity not defined by her oppression, I see parallels with Li'l Bit, the witty narrator of How I Learned to Drive. While Keisha's reckoning in Fairview occurs in the real-time of the play, How I Learned to Drive looks back in time, with an adult Li'l Bit presenting a fourth-wall-breaking, chronologically scattered account of her adolescent interactions with her predatory Uncle Peck. In the form of a Greek Chorus, Li'l Bit's family members sexualize her from childhood, maintain a willful (non-) ignorance of her uncle's abuse, fault her for the sexual harassment she endured as a teen, and belittle her educational ambitions because of her gender.³ And, like Keisha in Fairview, Li'l Bit learns who she is not through the stories that other characters tell about her. In short, both protagonists encounter an oppressive force whose pervasive, negative ideologies about race and gender warp the protagonists' identity formation, binding their self-perceptions to stereotypes that limit who they might become in the absence of that oppressor.

Notes

1. The White characters produce a positive pregnancy test and say it is Keisha's, though it is not; later they invent a plot in which the family lacks the money to send Keisha to college.

2. Ben Brantley, "Review: Theater as Sabotage in the Dazzling 'Fairview,'" The New York Times, June 17, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/17/theater/review-theater-as-sabotage-in-thedazzling-fairview.html.

3. Paula Vogel, How I Learned to Drive, revised edition (New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1998), 14.

Recommended Citation

Rodgers, Arleigh (2025) "Additional Information Ending, Leaving, Remaining: Young Women and Trauma in Fairview and How I Learned to Drive," Comparative Drama: Vol. 59: Iss. 1, Article 7.
Available at: https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/compdr/vol59/iss1/7