Another Broadway production has nixed plans for this season: The Manhattan Theater Club’s highly anticipated staging of Paula Vogel’s Pulitzer Prize-winning How I Learned to Drive, with Mary-Louise Parker and David Morse reprising roles they originated 23 years ago, has been postponed.
MTC says it’s finalizing plans to mount the production during the 2020-2021 season, according to a spokesperson.
The production follows other one-season postponements (Caroline, or Change, Birthday Candles, Flying Over Sunset) as well as outright cancellations (Hangmen, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?).
Other productions will no doubt take one of those routes, with the remainder of the entire 2019-2020 Broadway season uncertain at best. The theater shutdown announced on March 12 expires April 13, but that return date is moot: New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has extended the statewide shutdown through April 29.
The Broadway League, representing theater owners and producers, is meeting this week with various theatrical unions to hash out Broadway’s re-opening plans. A shutdown extension at least through May is possible, even likely, with some insiders expecting repeated extensions throughout the summer.
How I Learned To Drive, directed by Mark Brokaw, was to have begun previews at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre on March 27, with an opening night of April 22. MTC subsequently hoped to begin previews on May 1.
Vogel’s play follows a woman (played by Parker) coming to terms with the childhood sexual molestation she suffered at the hands of a beloved uncle (played by Morse).