by Rossella Menna for La Lettura
lead photo: Marijana Janković
When she first read “How I Learned to Drive” by playwright Paula Vogel, Tara Manić was twenty years old, studying directing in Belgrade, and had not yet gotten her driver’s license.
“That’s exactly why I read it!” the director, born in 1994 and an emerging figure in the Serbian theater scene, tells us. “I had misunderstood the title – I thought it was about driving, independence, a freedom that I hadn’t yet achieved.”
But it isn’t. The text, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1998, tells the story of sexual abuse inflicted by an uncle on his niece over several years, beginning when he teaches her how to drive.
A kind of “Lolita”, but this time written by a woman and narrated by the young girl who experienced the abuse. “What I remember most from my first reading is the feeling of claustrophobia, of not being able to breathe – as if I were watching the meetings between uncle and niece from the back seat of the car.”
About ten years later, that same feeling became the starting point for her direction of Vogel’s text, premiering in Italy on March 28 – 29 as part of the FOG Festival at Triennale Milano Teatro.
“Together with set designer Zorana Petrov, we decided there would be no realistically represented car. Instead, we chose to place the audience so close to the actors that everyone feels as if they are in the car with Li’l Bit and Uncle Peck.”
The two actors move within an intimate space that removes any visual barrier between the stage and audience. “I want the spectators to experience this uncomfortable proximity, feeling like witnesses to the story—and sometimes even accomplices to what Uncle Peck does to Lil Bit.”
Manić, now thirty-two, teaches at the Faculty of Dramatic Arts in Belgrade. She has worked in Serbia and abroad, participating in festivals and winning awards. She is an associate artist at Heartefact, an independent cultural center promoting creative, critical, and responsible engagement with artistic, social, and political issues.
Her generation grew up in a time when female voices began to emerge much more strongly in public space. “I was lucky to be educated in a period marked by the possibility of speaking,” she notes.
“This text, today in 2026 Serbia, is read differently than it was in 1997 in the United States. Paula Vogel spoke about her experiences with honesty and rawness, but did not explicitly name the theme at first. Public testimonies have completely changed our society. Issues that were once taboo – such as sexual violence, pedophilia, incest, and grooming – can now be discussed more openly.”
“I directed this text through my own dilemmas and experiences, and through reconsidering my position as someone who has sometimes enabled forms of violence I witnessed.”
The relationship between Li’l Bit and her uncle is not marked by explicit physical violence. Instead, it is a slow, subtle construction of abuse through everyday gestures and trust that infiltrates the gray areas of affection and authority.
There is no sudden eruption of aggression, but a gradual accumulation of words and actions in a dangerous intertwining of tenderness and abuse. The point of the text is precisely this: violence does not require explicit dissent to exist—only the absence of consent, especially in deeply asymmetrical relationships
“Their relationship is marked by constant ambivalence: love, tenderness, curiosity, teaching, trust, authority, and crossing boundaries,” Manić observes.
The strength of the text lies in the author’s empathy for both characters, as it explores the darkest aspects of human nature and questions the origins of abusive behavior.
“I don’t believe in evil as something separate from us,” Manić says. “Nor do I see violence as something abstractly distinct from human behavior. Vogel recognizes its potential within us in an incredibly raw yet subtle way.”
In “How I Learned to Drive”, violence is never shown explicitly on stage. “From the beginning, I wanted the performance to remain delicate and not re-traumatizing. In the theater, I’m not interested in reproducing violence itself. I prefer a language that works through the audience’s imagination.”
After all, true disturbance does not come from something monstrous and shocking, but from its unsettling, silent familiarity.
photo: Lorenza Daverio, Trienalle Milano
