Review: Buckle in for "How I Learned (NOT) to Drive"

How I Learned (NOT) to Drive

Written and performed by Jesse Bradley-Amore

Directed by Padraic Lillis

Presented at UNDER St. Marks

94 St. Marks Place, Manhattan, NYC

April 10-18, 2026

Jesse Bradley-Amore. Courtesy of Emily Owens PR
Living in most parts of New York City makes it easy to forget how difficult it is to live in the vast majority of places in the United States without a car. In solo show How I Learned (NOT) to Drive, playwright and performer Jesse Bradley-Amore not only lacks his own car at 40 years old but could not drive it if he had one, since he never got his driver's license during the nearly quarter century after he got his learner's permit. This lack, as he discusses, caused him various problems, some quite a bit larger than others. But this particular lack also indexically signals other lacks, other issues, stretching back to childhood. Bradley-Amore's autobiographical storytelling play, his first solo show, steers into self-examination with humor and honesty, with his (not) learning to drive the throughline linking stops on an often poignant, ultimately affirming road trip through the past and present of his romantic and familial life. How I Learned (NOT) to Drive is currently part of the 2026 New York City Fringe Festival, an open lottery-based theater festival in which one hundred percent of box office proceeds go directly to the artists, and which this year runs from April 1-19 at UNDER St. Marks, wild project, Chain Theatre, and The Rat NYC.
Jesse Bradley-Amore. Courtesy of Emily Owens PR
The show opens with Jesse at his driving test, panicking a bit about the car that he has been assigned, speaking to a more optimistic second person whose identity, in a clever reveal, is probably not what you would guess. Here, as throughout, Bradley-Amore is adept at using multiple voices to quickly establish not only the persons but the emotional dynamics within a given moment, memory, or scene. One of those voices is his second wife, Janine, and we quickly learn that saving their marriage is the primary motivation that brought him to the play's anxious opening moment. From there, Bradley-Amore flashes back to a childhood incident that indelibly colored his feelings about driving, which are interlaced with his feelings about the turbulent experience of growing up with his stepfather and emotionally withholding mother. Gravel-voiced and perpetually smoking, Jesse's mother lives by and instills in him the credo that one should never ask for help, a belief that extends to the mother-child relationship and may have been shaped by her relationship with her own parents. During Jesse's teen years, LiveJournal, writing poetry, and a fast food job give him access to money and a dating life that remains uncommitted until he settles down with Janine in his 30s and the story of their relationship brings us inexorably back to the question of whether he will pass his driving test this time and finally get his license. And if he succeeds, will it actually solve all of his problems?

Bradley-Amore's performance is energetic and funny, often in a self-deprecating way but also in sketching characters such as his retired-firefighter driving instructor or the girl with whom he had his first kiss. Teen thinking and behavior in the section leading up to that kiss is represented with an authenticity, including a dramatic reading of Jesse's first poem–an anti-conformity piece, of course–straight from a Five Star spiral notebook, that threw these spectators right back to their own high school years. Hand in hand with the humor, Bradley-Amore gives compelling expression to the guilt, trauma, anger, and insecurity that have marked his lived experience, including in nicely parallel moments when he makes it clear that real life doesn't follow the narrative conventions of movies…or plays. That said, in the end, How I Learned (NOT) to Drive suggests that just because you don't know the destination, that doesn't mean that you shouldn't get behind the wheel in the first place.

-John R. Ziegler and Leah Richards

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